Town note
Originally known as Norwottuck, meaning in the midst of the river, a name given by the Native Americans there.
about 0:09:00The story
Northampton, Massachusetts, lies in Hampshire County, about forty-five minutes from Boston and three hours from New York City. James Pietragallo introduces it as a former factory town that had a blue-collar boom in the 1950s and 1960s, fell into economic decline in the 1970s and was revived from the 1980s as a cultural centre. It was known as Paradise City and, more recently, as Lesbianville USA. Its population peaked at about 30,000 in 1960 and stood at 28,540 when the episode was recorded.
Her parents, Richard and Claudia Strickland, stayed together; her father had served in the Coast Guard and worked as an electronics engineer, and her mother was a substitute teacher. Her sister Tara Morgan was born in 1974. From her teens, according to her family, friends and neighbours, she was a compulsive liar. Boyfriends described her as strange, controlling and manipulative. She faked suicide attempts, damaged cars and scratched and hit people.
She was academically able. She graduated from high school at sixteen with high honours and enrolled at Bridgewater State College as a pre-med student. In 1984 she left an ex-boyfriend a note saying she had eaten glass and was going to die. He called for help; she was unharmed, and the college ordered her to receive psychiatric treatment. She left Bridgewater soon afterwards, went briefly to a community college and then to Greenfield Community College. In 1987 she finished a nursing programme and took a job as a home health aide with the Visiting Nurses Association of Franklin County. That year she used bath water to scald a disabled child over 60 per cent of his body; she was not prosecuted. A month later she chased him around the house with a butcher knife. In May 1988 she was licensed as a registered nurse.
On 6 March 1989 she began work at the Leeds Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton. She was well regarded: colleagues found her competent, she was featured in VA Practitioner magazine in April 1990, and she was called the social butterfly of the ward. Her son Brian was born in 1991, after which she moved to the four-to-midnight shift. Deaths on that shift began to rise. By the mid-1990s the death rate on her ward was about triple that of the previous three years. Colleagues joked that she was the angel of death, and one doctor refused to let her treat his patients. On 14 February 1992 she reported a bomb threat at the hospital and then found a strange box after police had searched the building and found nothing; the ward was evacuated for hours.
She began an affair with James Peralta, a hospital security guard, in 1994. In December 1994 she offered a vial of epinephrine to a fellow nurse who had asthma, and other staff began to notice that vials were missing from the locked drug cabinet.
Stanley Jagadowski, a sixty-six-year-old retired truck driver and Korean War veteran, died on 21 August 1995. A short time later she came home with two syringes of clear liquid, said she needed to draw blood, and injected him; his arms and chest went numb and he briefly lost consciousness. She said he had fainted at the sight of the needle, and he did not report it until a later custody dispute.
On 22 January 1996 Thomas Callahan, sixty, went into a crisis in intensive care; three used epinephrine vials were later found in the needle disposal bucket. Two days later Angelo Vela, a sixty-five-year-old former Marine, was injected while she was supposedly flushing his IV; his heart rate reached 300 and he survived, telling other nurses what she had done. On 15 February 1996 another patient collapsed after she flushed his lines, and three nurses, John Wall, Kathy Ricks and Renee Walsh, went to their superiors. Police began to investigate.
A statistical analysis put the chance of that being coincidence at less than 0.1 per cent.
On 10 July 1996 she told Peralta on the telephone that she had been killing patients, stealing epinephrine and using it to cause heart attacks, because she liked the excitement and because his being called in let her spend time with him. On 15 September she attacked Glenn at his house with her car keys; later that month she blocked Peralta's car and damaged his tyres, windscreen and paint after he agreed to testify.
On 26 September 1996 she bought a Talk Girl Jr voice changer at Toys R Us. That evening Peralta, at the hospital security desk, took a call in a distorted voice warning of three explosive devices. More than ten calls followed in ninety minutes, and more came on later days, some with a southern drawl. A state trooper saw her entering a phone booth outside an ice cream stand moments before one call, and police removed the distortion and identified her voice.
While she was held, bodies were exhumed and tested; epinephrine was found in several, including Edward Squira's in November 1997. The death rate on Ward C fell back to normal while she was away.
That month at least eight wrongful death claims had been filed against the hospital. Federal prosecutors announced in May 1999 that they would seek the death penalty.