Morgue (21 page)

The defense put on its own vigorous case, mostly with a stream of medical experts to rebut the DA's evidence. They also advised Genene not to testify, knowing she'd be exposed as an arrogant liar very quickly. After some tense moments when she appeared she would ignore their advice—just as she had so often ignored doctors' orders in the ICU—and testify anyway, she demurred.

A month after it began, the
State of Texas vs. Genene Jones
was nearing its end. All that remained were the closing arguments.

Nick Rothe, a San Antonio assistant DA who was helping Sutton because of a second pending case against Jones in the near death of little Rolando Santos, summarized the prosecution's case in an emotional two-hour presentation.

“What we need to do is get back to what this is all about,” Rothe started. “It is about a dead little girl, this one.”

He held up a photo of Chelsea McClellan.

He reminded them of the evidence they'd heard, of the visits to doctors that ended in death or frightful emergencies. He implored the jury to consider the patterns as he directed their attention to a large calendar on an easel. A little rag doll marked the date of every reported seizure in Dr. Holland's office.

“There are rag dolls all over that calendar,” Rothe said.

Then he pointed out one week on the calendar when no seizures were reported. The days were blank. Why?

“That's the week Genene Jones was in the hospital,” he said. “There are no rag dolls that week because the nurse wasn't there.”

Silence.

The defense summed up its case: Chelsea died of natural causes. Genene Jones was an innocent scapegoat. And Dr. Holland was too suspicious to ignore.

“They have done everything in their power to direct your attention away from the facts of this case,” Jones's lawyer said, “in an attempt to hide the truth from you, and confuse you, and panic you, and bully you into returning a verdict of guilty.”

After a short rebuttal by DA Sutton, the judge handed the case to the jury a little after two p.m. on February 15, 1984.

“You might as well just settle down and get a good book to read,” the judge told his court reporter, expecting a long, difficult deliberation.

But he was wrong. The jury took less than three hours to reach its verdict. I was surprised when the local TV station broke into a program with a bulletin the jury was back.

Guilty.

A small group of sign-carrying demonstrators outside erupted in cheers. Relatives of Jones's victims in the courtroom hugged and cried. The verdict was bittersweet for the McClellans; it wouldn't bring their daughter back, but her killer would spend the rest of her life behind bars.

“We can finally bury her,” Chelsea's grandmother told a reporter, “and they can't dig her up no more.”

A rattled Jones, so confident she'd go free, wept as bailiffs led her to a police cruiser and took her to jail.

A few days later, she was sentenced to ninety-nine years for the lethal injection of Chelsea McClellan. A few months later, she was also convicted of deliberately injuring Rolando Santos, and got sixty more years, to be served at the same time as her other prison sentence. Justice was done. (At the time, the San Antonio DA told a
Washington Post
reporter, “There will be no additional indictments of Genene Jones. No useful purpose will be served. I think [she] will spend the rest of her life in jail.”)

But in the flush of the moment, nobody anticipated a hidden booby trap in the punishment that wouldn't rear its head for a few decades.

And when it did, it would feel like we were digging up that little girl all over again.

*   *   *

Why did she do it?

Nobody really knows. Like Martha Woods, some form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy is likely. Prosecutors say Genene Jones had a hero complex, a pathological need for the attention she received when she rescued a child (whose imminent death she had caused). It's possible, they said, that she never intended to kill them, but only wanted to draw them to the brink of dying so she could save them. Others say she relished the power she drew from playing the pivotal role in a life-and-death drama. Or maybe she just liked the excitement and the admiration she got from doctors, whom she revered as desirable demigods. Or maybe she was acting out her own alleged childhood abuses.

We simply don't know, and she isn't telling.

As was the case with Martha Woods, I believe Genene Jones's motives were complicated beyond rational understanding. No matter what they were, it falls to someone else, here on earth and beyond, to know. My first obligation is not to her, but to Chelsea McClellan and any other children whose paths might have ended in Genene Jones's arms.

Two villains emerged in this tragedy. One was Genene Jones, a psychopathic serial killer whose true death toll might never be known. The other was a political hospital culture that covered its own ass rather than face the truth.

Genene Jones might have murdered up to forty-six infants and children in her care, but the exact number will never be known because after her first conviction, the Bexar County Hospital (now University Medical Center) shredded nearly thirty tons of hospital records that covered the period of Jones's employment, destroying any potential documentary evidence against her. The hospital said the shredding was routine; prosecutors have surmised it was done to shield the hospital from any further legal liability and bad press.

Some good parents lost their kids. Some good people lost their careers. But the politicians, lawyers, and doctors walked away untouched, like they always do.

We learned nothing from Genene Jones's slaughter of innocents.

Nothing.

*   *   *

In 2014, the Texas Parole Board denied Genene Jones freedom for a ninth time. In the early days, protesters always showed up to oppose her release; as the years passed, the protests grew smaller and quieter, until recently. Now at sixty-four, she begged for compassion, claiming to be dying of stage four kidney disease. Three decades had passed since she went to prison for murdering Chelsea McClellan. Her mug shot no longer pictures a cold-eyed thirtysomething but a dour, sagging frump, more lunch lady than serial killer.

Ah, but Genene Jones is still dangerous.

When she was sentenced to ninety-nine years in the 1980s, Texas had mandatory release laws designed to relieve prison overcrowding. No matter how evil or violent, every inmate was credited with three days of time served for every day of good behavior behind bars. More than a thousand criminals imprisoned in Texas between 1977 and 1987 are still in prison and eligible for mandatory release, and hundreds of those are killers. The law was later changed but still applies in Jones's case.

For more than thirty years, Genene Jones has kept her nose clean. So instead of dying in prison as she should, she is now scheduled to be released on March 1, 2018. A free woman.

The district attorney's office in San Antonio—where Jones might have killed dozens of children in at least one local hospital—has scrambled to find a new case against Jones among the many dead babies she left in her wake.

We have considered exhuming the little bodies of possible victims, but the likelihood of finding any solid forensic evidence at this point is slim. If Jones injected her victims with the extraordinarily hard-to-detect succinylcholine or merely smothered them, their remains likely wouldn't yield definitive clues.

More recently, old grand jury records from 1983 have surfaced. They might contain enough copies of old hospital documents to file new charges, but it could be the last gasp in the desperate mission to keep Genene Jones in prison where she belongs. Time will tell.

If something doesn't happen, and if Genene Jones survives long enough, she'll walk out of a Texas prison a free woman in 2018. And for the first time in the history of American crime and punishment, we will have knowingly and purposely released a captive serial killer back into society.

Her victims might be past caring, but the living deserve better.

 

‹ SEVEN ›

Secrets and Puzzles

We're all tangled up in the puzzles of life. We accept there are mysteries we cannot answer, but we go looking for answers anyway. So we put the puzzle pieces together endlessly, then disassemble them endlessly. We always have, and always will. Death offers us a lot of puzzles, too, but I think death's mystery is in what we can see, not what is hidden. The clues are always there for us to find whatever answers we seek. It's not unnatural to look and wonder … it's unnatural to walk away.

WHEATLAND, WYOMING. THURSDAY, JULY 5, 1984.

Martin Frias spent the day after the Fourth completely alone, aching in body and spirit.

A running argument with his girlfriend had started a few days before, and it was still simmering. She didn't want to be around him, so she drove the kids to the park in town that afternoon, just so she wouldn't have to put up with his crap. He fell into a funk, half sorry, half pissed.

Martin had sneaked into America from Mexico in 1979, looking for work. He found his way to Wyoming, where there were plenty of jobs and a man could hide in plain sight. In 1981, he met Ernestine Jean Perea, freshly divorced and now raising her four-year-old daughter alone. They were both in their early twenties and were both desperately seeking a safe place to land.

They rented a green-and-white single-wide trailer on a dirt road, on the other side of the railroad tracks, in the badlands southwest of Wheatland, Wyoming, a prairie farm town. Martin found a good job at a local quarry. He was a hardworking guy, soft-spoken and serious. Although he was only about five-foot-nine, he was wiry and strong. He'd even been a promising baseball pitcher as a boy in Mexico.

Martin's boss liked him, and when he was working—when the money was coming in—life was good.

But things hadn't been right for a couple months, since Martin's right arm had nearly been torn off by a rock crusher. The first surgery on his arm had gone badly, and now he was drawing only worker's comp while his corrective surgery healed.

His right arm was useless in its sling, money was scarce, and he could do nothing but sit around the trailer, drink cheap beer, and watch TV all day while Ernestine took care of their three rambunctious preschool kids. He complained about her drinking. He complained about her cooking. He complained about her friends. He complained about everything. It drove her nuts and she threw it all back at him, with the same hostility. Her temper often flared, like the time long before Martin when she'd stabbed her ex-husband with a screwdriver. This time Ernestine told her mother she was planning to take the kids and move out. In fact, she'd already stored some of her possessions in her mother's Cheyenne garage.

So after the Fourth of July, still stewing, Ernestine trundled the kids to the town park, where she met some friends for a picnic. Somebody brought a lot of beer. Booze took the edge off Ernestine's furies, and pretty soon she was feeling no pain. She finally felt free as she wrestled playfully with some of the young men in the grass and forgot about Martin for a few hours. She liked it, but she joked to her friends that there'd be a big argument when she finally went home.

Ernestine didn't know Martin had followed her and watched from his truck. It enraged him to see her with those men, laughing and playing grab-ass. He drove away and got drunk.

That night around nine thirty, after the little town's sidewalks had rolled up for the night, Martin came home to a dark trailer. When Ernestine and the kids came in later, Martin helped put the children to bed in their separate rooms. Without a word, Ernestine went to her bedroom, where she'd been sleeping alone for the last couple of nights, and closed the door behind her.

Martin's long, sad day ended in silence. He turned off the light and curled up on the hide-a-bed where he'd been sleeping since Ernestine banished him from the bedroom. Restless after a turbulent day that had ended without resolution, he eventually fell asleep.

But he hadn't been asleep long when he was awakened by a thump, like somebody outside had kicked the side of the trailer. Maybe the wind blew something against the tin siding, or maybe a stray dog was nuzzling around. He got up and glanced in the kids' rooms and squinted into the dark outside. Nothing. He lay awake on the sofa for a while, listening, but he didn't hear it again and drifted back to sleep.

A couple of hours later, around one a.m., Martin awoke again to a baby's crying.

Groggy and still a little drunk, he shambled in the dark toward the sound of the cries, which seemed to be coming from Ernestine's room.

He opened the door and turned on the light, but it took a moment to comprehend what he saw: Ernestine was lying on her back on the floor, bleeding from a gaping belly wound. Her daughter sobbed uncontrollably as she tried to lift her mother's head. Blood and bits of flesh were sprayed on the wall beside the door. And Martin's .300 Weatherby Magnum hunting rifle lay between Ernestine's legs.

She didn't move. Or breathe.

Ernestine Perea was dead, just three weeks shy of her twenty-eighth birthday.

Horrified, Martin scooped up the child and ran to the kitchen to dial 911. His English wasn't good and he couldn't make them understand how to get to his trailer, so he arranged to meet the police at a café in town and lead them back.

*   *   *

The first responders—a town cop, a sheriff's deputy, and the little prairie town's mortician, who also served as the county coroner—found no signs of a struggle or intruder in the cramped little bedroom. Judging by the body's position, the rifle's location beside her left leg (immediately moved by a deputy, who checked its chamber for live rounds), her massive, ragged belly wound, and the splatter of blood, guts, and bone fragments on the wall and closed door behind Ernestine, they quickly concluded she'd killed herself in a messy, gut-shot suicide.