- Panic fills the halls
of a small Indiana hospital.
- My dad was in code blue.
He felt like he was burning on the inside.
- During that year,
101 people died in a four-bed ICU.
- We didn't even know what the cause of death was.
It could have been a toxin, a poison.
- Investigators went to extreme lengths
to stop a deranged killer.
- To rule out death from "natural causes,"
I requested to exhume bodies.
- The grave becomes a crime scene.
The casket would be brought up, opened.
- What happened
was the epitome of evil.
- The nurse was killing patients.
And the son of a bitch could get away with it.
- As a doctor and certified expert
for the California Medical Board,
I know firsthand that most medical professionals
will go to any length to help their patients,
but in some cases there are those with a deranged mind
and a license to kill.
- Little Clinton, Indiana.
It's just a kind of a small country town;
one of those small towns
where virtually everyone knows each other.
- People are very nice there.
It's very quiet,
close-knit.
You know everybody.
You know everything that's going on.
And everybody gets along.
It's just a nice place to live.
My grandmother was Dorothea Hixon.
She was a very loving, very caring person.
When I was growing up,
I enjoyed being at her house a lot.
It was warm and inviting.
- Any time you dropped in,
that was one of the first things she'd usually say.
"You eat anything today?
You want something to eat? You hungry?"
It was just a good feeling just to go in there,
just to walk in the door.
She always made you feel very welcome and loved.
- She was a nurse at Vermillion County Hospital
for many, many years.
I can remember her saying that she enjoyed it.
When she came home, she felt like she had
accomplished something, because
she had helped so many people that day.
- And then when Nana advanced in years,
she started having some problems
with congestive heart failure.
- Congestive heart failure occurs
when the heart's ability
to pump blood to the body is reduced.
The resulting backup of fluid into the lungs
makes it extremely difficult to breathe.
Dorothea often had to be admitted to the ICU
for treatment that would remove the excess fluid.
And when it was time for her to receive that care,
Dorothea chose to go to the same hospital
where she worked for so many years,
Vermillion County Hospital.
- They would just give her a little bit of medicine
in order to get the excess fluids draining off her body.
We always said we were gonna take her in
and dry her out and bring her back home.
She'd be fine for a while.
My grandmother would almost tell 'em how to do it.
Because of her being a nurse,
she knew a lot of the nurses that were there.
They would traipse in and, "Dorothea, how are you doing?"
She was always loved.
- I remember getting the call from mom letting me know
that Nana was going to the hospital again.
And I remember in my mind, it was like,
"Okay, gonna go in and get her dried out again.
Um, normal practice."
And in a day or two, she'd come home.
So it wasn't an emergency anymore.
I remember going into the ICU to see her.
I talked to her briefly.
I remember her telling me specifically
when I asked her "How you feeling, Nana?"
"Pretty good; just having
a little bit of difficulty breathing again."
And I was there a very short time and left.
- My Nana, you know, just nestled into her bed.
She was alert.
She was talking.
And she was, you know, "Well, I'm back home
"and I'll get dried out and be back
to my other home before too long."
Just happy and she knew what the routine was.
But it was just a matter of a few minutes.
That she had passed.
She was gone.
We didn't know if she'd had a heart attack;
if she'd had a stroke, if--
we didn't know what happened to her.
We just knew that she just was gasping
and then was gone.
I just didn't want to believe it.
'Cause when my mother took her in, she was talking
and she was happy and she knew what the routine was,
and the routine didn't go the same way.
- It was a shock.
Everything had been so routine,
so repetitive
that you couldn't believe that it happened.
Um...
Very big loss
to the whole family.
And... I gotta take a second, guys.
Sorry.
- Dorothea's family came to terms with her death
because she was elderly.
But what they didn't know
was that she was part of an alarming trend.
- The first few months at the hospital,
I start noticing that there are quite a few codes
being called,
and they're all coming from the intensive care unit.
- If somebody became unresponsive,
there would be a code blue.
So everyone in the hospital hears this code going off.
And in the backs of their mind, they were saying,
"I thought I was hearing that code a lot."
But nobody went beyond that.
- So at this point, people are talking about
this high number of codes and the high number of deaths
in our facility.
Or I could see people talking and whispering,
I thought things were odd.
Something was happening; we didn't know what.
- The pressure was on to figure out what was causing
the rapid increase in patient deaths
before another life was lost.
- The nurses and doctors who worked at that hospital
began thinking there could be some kind of
an epidemic happening in Clinton,
something that was attributable to a virus,
you know, or some kind of a germ
or a bug that would cause old people to die
at this kind of rate.
During the entire year,
101 people died
in a four-bed ICU.
- But the dots didn't get connected
until there were an awful lot of people who had died.
- Something was killing these people.
So we had to find out what's going on at that hospital.
- Coming up...
the clock was ticking
and lives were on the line.
- The hospital couldn't figure out why people
were dying at that increased rate.
- Medical experts investigated
whatever would naturally cause a person's death,
and they're finding nothing.
- The head of nursing started to look
at shifts and deaths.
The numbers just leapt out.
- There seemed to be one nurse there
when they're dying.
- In 1994
at Vermillion County Hospital in Indiana,
the number of patient deaths was at an all-time high,
five times greater than in any other year.
So the nursing staff took it upon themselves
to dig in to patient records
where they discovered a terrifying trend.
- The nursing staff in the IC unit
knew that the number of deaths were increasing.
They'd gone from about 2 to 21/2 a month
up to 7 to 8, 9;
one month, 12.
And they couldn't figure out why people
were dying at that increased rate.
- The head of nursing thought that maybe
there was a problem in the reporting process
as shifts changed.
- She thought perhaps
the nurses that were coming onto a shift
were not getting adequate information
about the state of the patients
from the nurses that were leaving the shift.
So she thought it was perhaps a communication problem.
- Once she started to look
at shifts and deaths,
the numbers just leapt out,
and they could not be ignored.
One particular nurse
was present for most of these deaths.
So she went to her administrator.
And the hospital's attorney
called the Indiana state police.
- When we met with the hospital attorney
and the hospital CEO, they started talking about
a supervising nurse over the intensive care unit
who had done this study,
and they laid the statistics on us.
There seemed to be one nurse there when they're dying.
- These deaths were correlated to the shift
of Orville Lynn Majors.
- There was usually one nurse
that would take especially good care of Nana.
- I met Lynn Majors
when Nana was in the hospital down there.
He was a very genuine, heartfelt individual.
- He was very caring.
Kissed her on the forehead.
- Lynn was a good nurse,
I think because he was so knowledgeable.
And he clearly knew more than I did
about working in the ICU.
I remember Lynn would talk very sweetly with patients.
And he was excellent at teaching the patients
about what was happening to them.
And the other nurses thought so highly of him.
- Mr. Majors was popular among the staff.
And many people thought that he was a doctor
because he conducted himself
as if he had a lot of authority.
- Looking back on it,
I wish I had noticed these codes were happening
when he was at work.
We all had a sense of guilt
and sadness
'cause we didn't know.
- The numbers were stunning.
Mr. Majors was present
90% to 95% of the time
when someone was dying.
He was there.
When he worked on weekends, people died on weekends.
When he worked during the week,
they died during the week.
Usually they didn't die if he wasn't there.
So the hospital suspended him with pay.
The nursing board took his license.
And once his license was taken,
then they terminated him.
- Based on the study done by hospital employees,
police suspected that Lynn Majors had a connection
to the increased number of deaths.
But to prove it, they first had to consider motive
and then identify which patients' deaths
were actually murder.
- It's horrifying, the idea that
someone who's supposed to take care of you
would kill you.
So we tried to get inside the mind of someone like this.
- We brought in a psychologist.
And we said, "Describe
a hospital setting serial killer."
They are a control freak.
They're the one in charge.
They're egotistical.
- We know how he acted at the hospital environment.
He would grieve demonstrably with the families
when a death took place.
He became immersed in that process with the family.
- Which made him feel powerful.
There are simply people who enjoy
watching other people grieve.
- Clearly that need
for the power and control and attention
existed at a pathological level with him.
But that doesn't prove that he committed
the offense of murder beyond a reasonable doubt.
- It was challenging, 'cause you really didn't know
who died suspiciously in this hospital.
So we knew that "We gotta find out who the victims are."
It could have been an excess of 100 people that he killed.
- Up until this stage in the investigation,
doctors believed these people died of natural causes.
These bodies were found in a hospital
where you expect to find people who have expired.
There wasn't anything unusual about that.
- We knew it's very unusual that this nurse
was present with these patients on
the majority of the deaths.
So we investigated every patient that died
like it was a murder case.
But if it was actually murder at all,
we didn't even know what the cause of death was.
It could have been a toxin, a poison.
We just didn't have any idea what we were looking at.
So it was kind of groundbreaking
for the Indiana state police department.
No one had done a case of this magnitude.
- And the pressure of the case was enormous.
We didn't have an answer to what happened.
We're all thinking he killed people,
but, one, we couldn't prove it.
And, two, we had no way of really
knowing for sure how he did it.
- The head of nursing's
internal study revealed
that nurse Lynn Majors was present
for nearly every unexplained fatality in the ICU.
So he was fired from the hospital.
Law enforcement did not believe
the connection was a coincidence.
They suspected Majors murdered his patients.
But police needed to gather more concrete evidence
before they could charge him with a crime.
- I went to him.
And he had already hired an attorney.
And he said, "If you want to talk to me,
you have to talk to my attorney."
So I knew then,
once he had an attorney involved,
your chances of getting him to say anything are...
slim.
At that point in time,
the hospital CEO gave me permission
to go up and photograph the ICU unit.
And it gave the layout of everything,
showed where the heart monitors
were positioned above the bed.
But when I started talking about some medical files,
they wouldn't give us anything.
So we go to the court,
and we start subpoenaing medical files.
- For the first time, we had hard evidence.
We had actual medical records
up until the moment these people died;
at the instant of their death, in many cases.
But it was far beyond my capacity to understand it.
- So we divvied up the medical files
to our medical experts.
And so the medical team, one by one,
went through each file and talked about
what they saw that was unusual.
Then kind of the wheels came off
of the confidentiality part of this investigation.
An anonymous letter went to the news media
talking about a serial killer
by the name of Lynn Majors
walking the halls of the Vermillion County Hospital.
And we know it's clearly somebody
that works at that hospital that authored it,
because the information they had was pretty accurate.
- The news media coined the phrase the "angel of death."
And they used that in their headlines
when they spoke of Mr. Majors.
- To that point, the people in the community
hadn't known that Lynn Majors was our suspect.
When that happened,
then the lid blew off of everything.
- This news spread very quickly in the community.
There were people who were very sympathetic
and did not think he had
any involvement at all in these deaths.
There were people who maintained simply
these were old people,
they were ill, and they died.
And it is not Mr. Majors fault that he happened to be present.
And those who knew him were adamant about that.
- I heard scuttle that he thought
he was helping these elderly people
who didn't have a quality of life.
And that he was just helping them go on.
I just-- I couldn't believe it.
So I had told my mom, "Until we find out anything,
"we've gotta give him the benefit of the doubt.
"And if there is anything to this story,
"we'll handle it then.
"But until then, we just need to sit back
and see what's going on."
- Do you think that people here have made up their minds
whether he's guilty or innocent?
- Some have.
- It divided the community.
- I really think he's guilty.
- Sometime I don't think he's guilty;
sometime I think he is.
- There's no way he could have done it.
No way he could have done it,
and they're gonna find the poor boy guilty.
- But nobody really knew at that point
if it was true
that he had done it.
Because the times when
I saw Lynn care for people,
he was doing a good job.
- And it divided the local medical community.
It forced everybody to take a position.
- Still didn't want to believe that
Lynn Majors possibly murdered my grandmother.
Seemed like a very caring, heartfelt individual;
talked to the family like he was part of the family.
It was just hard to believe that
he could have possibly been involved
in something that was like that.
- Debate raged on in Indiana,
so six months later, Majors went on a PR offensive
to tell his side of the story.
- Well, in Clinton, Indiana, they are accusing this man
of killing people in intensive care.
- Through the investigation,
we saw where Lynn Majors and his attorney
were on various national TV shows
and portraying his innocence.
- I still like nursing, and I want my license back,
'cause I think that it was suspended unjustly.
I mean, it just physically makes me sick.
- As investigators, we're saying, "Hey, you know what?
"Let's just take a look and see what he's got to say.
Maybe he's gonna say something that we need to hear."
- They said I was present, I think,
at 130 out of 147 deaths.
Well, I may have been present,
but I wasn't the only one present.
There was many other people there when those people died.
The state board of health made it sound like
I was alone with those people when they died,
and that's not the case whatsoever.
- The defense was that he was being
railroaded in some manner;
that he was a scapegoat
for poor hospital procedures
or poor local doctors
and that people were out to get him.
- Your lawyer would like me to make it very clear
that you have been charged with nothing.
- I've done absolutely nothing wrong.
- And that's when people
started calling us saying, "Hey, listen.
"I saw something.
"I saw Majors injecting something
into these patients."
They said, "He injected my mom,
and she died within two or three minutes."
I'm thinking, "That's not normal."
So now we were convinced that he had killed these patients.
But we're scratching our heads thinking,
"Okay, how is he doing it?"
- There was a theory that he killed these people
by injecting them with substances
which would cause them great trauma,
would cause their hearts to stop beating.
But the goal's still ten feet high.
We still needed to drill down on evidence to prove it.
- After Lynn Majors
proclaimed his innocence
in several national television interviews,
police were inundated with calls
from people who were concerned
he may have killed their family members.
One of them was Rodney Smith,
whose father recently died while under Majors' care
at Vermillion County Hospital.
- My dad was Cecil Ivan Smith.
He was a good man.
He was a caring person.
It was on April 1994, on Easter Day.
My dad wasn't feeling very good.
We took him to the hospital, found out he had pneumonia.
'Cause of his age-- he was in his 70s--
They wanted to keep him overnight.
The next morning,
the hospital was gonna release him.
The next day, my mom said my dad
was in code blue.
By the time I got there,
he was already in ICU.
Lynn Majors walked in there, and--
So I looked at Lynn Majors,
and I said, "What's my dad's chances?"
He says, "Not good."
And he actually gave him a shot,
but we didn't know what it was.
And then that's when my dad said that
he felt like he was burning on the inside.
And the next thing I knew, he passed away.
It took me a long time to get over,
'cause I made him go to the hospital.
Can I stop?
Sorry.
- And now, for the first time,
Dorothea Hixon's family was also questioning
if Lynn Majors was really the loving nurse
he appeared to be.
- My mother, Betty,
got a phone call from the reporters.
And was asking her, "How do you feel about Lynn Majors
possibly murdering your mother?"
And she said, "I hung up."
And I told her, I said, "We can't jump to conclusions.
We've got to call the state police."
- And some of Dorothea Hixon's family members
witnessed something really seriously wrong
at the hospital,
something really bizarre.
- My mom and my Aunt Paula
were both standing by my grandmother's bed.
And Orville Lynn went to give her this injection in her IV.
- Lynn Majors made an injection.
And then her eyes rolled back in her head,
and she died before he ever left the room.
- There was a lot of questions of what he gave and why.
And then when they talked to my grandmother's doctor,
he said that there had never been an injection ordered.
That's when things really started coming into view
of what had happened.
I was very hurt.
The way he treated our family
when we was in there
and the show he put on,
and then to find out that
he possibly murdered my grandmother,
there's a lot of anger.
- Investigators had their first real lead:
Eyewitnesses.
But it wasn't enough to arrest Majors.
Now police needed to find out
exactly what he was injecting into those victims
that would cause sudden death.
- I talked with the medical team
about what the two daughters witnessed.
They're looking at the medical file
and seeing the heart pattern widening
at the time Lynn Majors documented the injection.
- So I had the medical team focus on
whether the death was sudden, unexplained,
and occurred for reasons other than
what the patient was admitted for.
- And then one of our medical team members said,
"I'm seeing some unusual things
with the EKG readings prior to the death."
- We brought in Dr. Prystowsky
because he was a well-known electrophysiologist
who had written a book on cardiac arrhythmias.
- One by one, went through the charts
reading the history
so you could see these electrocardiogram strips.
And I remember seeing one of them, thinking,
"You know, I've seen this pattern before,
but it was many, many years ago."
I knew what high potassium did to an electrocardiogram.
There are two other things that could cause this pattern:
A massive heart attack...
And a massive clot to the lung.
If I could rule out those two things,
then we know you're left with one choice:
Potassium overdose.
- And so the medical team decided
that we needed to do an exhumation
and the autopsies
were all about eliminating
any other possibility of their death.
- I said, "Look.
"I want you to take a very close look at the lungs
"and make sure there is no massive clots to the lung.
"You have to take a very close look at the heart
and make sure there was no massive heart attack."
I had requested to exhume bodies.
Then you come to a point where you realize,
"This is on you, Prystowsky.
I mean, if you're wrong, you're big-time wrong."
- In 1996, nurse Lynn Majors
was suspected of killing over 100 patients.
But to charge him, detectives had to find a murder weapon.
Investigators believe he injected potassium
into his victims,
but to confirm that, they had to rule out
a heart attack or blood clots in the lungs.
So police took on the grim task of exhuming
and performing autopsies on 15 bodies--
those who had been witnessed receiving an injection
and who also had widening patterns on their EKG readings.
- The exhumation itself was an involved process.
Because the grave becomes a crime scene.
And as a crime scene,
it has to be treated in a particular way
designed to preserve evidence.
The state police would cordon off a place.
The exhumation would be made.
The casket would be brought up,
the lid would be opened,
and identification was made.
- The whole family, we all meet out at the cemetery.
I remember a lot of reporters;
all kinds of cameras.
There's a tent over her gravesite
where they're gonna be exhuming her.
My mom and my aunt had been told
that they were gonna have to identify the body.
And they were...
very, very upset.
And thank God,
the coroner at that time, of Vermillion County,
was a very good friend of the family.
He came in and said, "Since I knew Dorothea,
I will identify her so you don't have to."
I-- I think it would have probably
really pushed 'em over the edge
to have to see their mother after two or three years
and exhume her and open the casket
and have to identify her.
- We'd done-- went through the funeral with her,
and laid her to rest once.
And then here we are out here
with a piece of machinery bringing her back up.
Just about like reliving the day that she passed away.
You know, it was a rough day.
Rough day.
- Of course, they asked, um, me and mom
if it was okay to exhume my dad's body.
And my mom really didn't want the body exhumed,
but I told them, "Go ahead and do it.
"'Cause I want to be sure that
my dad did die from Lynn Majors."
But it's just hard.
How can you bury a person twice?
And it happened.
- So the autopsies find nobody died of a massive heart attack.
Nobody had clots to the lung.
That leaves us now with potassium
as the only logical conclusion
for what these electrocardiograms look like.
Since other natural causes didn't occur,
you know he killed 'em.
I mean, there's no other question in my mind.
The son of a bitch killed 'em with potassium.
Now comes the hard part.
We had to somehow connect Lynn Majors
to the murder weapon.
- To get an arrest warrant,
we had to prove that Lynn Majors was the nurse
that made the injection
of potassium chloride into the IV.
So now we've gotta find some physical evidence
that potassium would have been in his possession.
We found out Lynn Majors had a roommate.
So we decided to polygraph him,
and he was struggling with one question on the polygraph
about did he have any suspicion that Lynn Majors
could be killing patients in the hospital?
And he kept getting reactions to that.
Finally we got him to say, "Well,
"the reason I'm having that problem is,
I found the potassium chloride bottles in his room."
So with that answer,
one of our investigators went to the property
to identify the resident and get
the information we needed for the search warrant.
- Even though the house had been abandoned,
he looked in the garage
and saw potassium vials
laying on the floor and in a box.
You know, he calls us;
we get search warrants and went in there.
And we got those vials
and was able to trace them
back to Vermillion County Hospital.
- The physical evidence of those vials of potassium
was very important,
because they should never have left the hospital.
- I mean, that closed the loop.
Now you're not talking about conjecture.
You know, you're talking about the substance
now being in fact in his possession.
- By December of 1997,
two years into the investigation,
police finally had enough hard evidence
to arrest Lynn Majors.
- Once we had the arrest warrant, I took it,
drove to Linton, Indiana, where he lived.
- Lynn, do you have any comment to say?
- No.
- I think it was almost like he was expecting it.
- Still say you're innocent, Lynn?
- Yes.
- They went through tons of medical records
to decide which counts to charge.
In which case do we have family members
who are giving us testimony about his presence,
what he said, and what occurred?
And do they coincide with the ones that are medically strong?
- Lynn, do you have comment?
- How do you feel about the charges?
- You know, you couldn't charge every case
whose deaths Mr. Majors was present for.
Because that would have overwhelmed a jury.
- So prosecutors ultimately charged Majors
with seven counts of murder.
- This is a murder trial.
You've gotta explain to a jury
that's never thought about electrophysiology,
and you gotta explain to them
how potassium killed all these people.
And if I can't convince them,
the son of a bitch could get away with it.
- Accused killer Lynn Majors was held without bail
for the possible murder of seven elderly ICU patients
at Vermillion County Hospital
until trial.
- I remember just looking at him
and thinking, "How could you do this?
"So many people trusted you.
How could you do this?"
And I was very angry, very angry.
- To be near him at the trial is a sickening feeling.
Because, to me, he is the epitome of evil.
He robbed people of their life.
He took that from them and from their families.
I wanted justice for every single patient
that he killed.
- I was hoping and praying
that they've got enough evidence
to actually come through with a conviction.
I knew the prosecution had a job to do.
I knew that this team was doing
the best they possibly could.
I knew Nina was getting everything in the right order,
and not just for us,
but for all the families that were involved in this.
- The process of the trial
is to provide the evidence that supports your narrative.
The most important thing, of course, was
the testimony of the expert witnesses, the doctors.
- I have to make sure the jury understands
the basic function of the heart and the different systems.
A heart's like a four-room house.
A house has walls, plumbing, and electricity.
The heart has walls,
plumbing, which is the coronary blood flow,
and electricity.
It has its own electrical system.
I was gonna have the heart, the house,
and an electrocardiogram underneath
and give them the fundamental knowledge
they needed to know
what normal was.
And then I was gonna go into
what abnormal was;
get them to understand
potassium is the murder weapon.
- He took very complicated material
and made it understandable.
- I wanted us to win.
I wanted this guy to be put away.
And of course, Lynn Majors is staring the whole time--
two and a half days on the stand, just stared at me.
Never said a word.
- The jury was out three and a half days.
That, to me, was the most difficult part of the case,
because all you could do was wait.
- You just wonder, "Is he gonna walk?"
I thought to myself,
"There's absolutely no way he can get by with this."
But still there's a doubt in the back of your mind.
"What if he does?"
- When the judge read the verdict for count one
as guilty...
It felt like the weight of the world was off my shoulders.
Ultimately, of the seven charge cases we took to trial,
we had six convictions,
and they hung on Cecil Smith.
- When the verdict come back,
I was shocked. My mom was shocked.
We just both looked at each-- "How can it be?"
The jury had a hard time 'cause they thought
it took longer for my father to pass away
than the other victims.
And the other victims were passing away
not too long after the injection of the potassium.
My dad took a lot longer.
My dad, he was a good man,
never hurt anybody.
Why would somebody take somebody else's life?
Lynn Majors,
I hate him.
- We know from a legal standpoint,
he killed six people.
From a standpoint of medical team opinions
and a standpoint of investigative evidence,
we think the case can be made that he killed 100.
No amount of trials or verdicts
are going to change that.
And it's not gonna bring back
any one of these loved ones that died at his hands.
That's what's so tragic.
This is still an open wound
in terms of the effects to this community
and the surviving family members
of the people who died.
- I wanted to kill him.
He put on a big show, making everybody think that he cared,
when in reality, he was playing God.
And he was the one deciding whether someone lived or died.
- It's relief that we got him.
But then you get angry because he took my grandmother,
who was a good person.
He put a big hole in the family because of that.
I'm sad that he took her too early.
But I also know that she loved me so much.
My grandkids and my great-grandson
will know how good of a woman she was.
I think she looks down and smiles.
- The cold-blooded killer Lynn Majors
was sentenced to 360 years in prison
for the murder of six patients.
But the fallout stretched far past Majors' conviction.
Over 70 civil cases were filed
against Vermillion County Hospital,
which lost its accreditation
and eventually closed its doors.
For more on "License to Kill," go to oxygen.com.