In a California hospital,
a notorious serial killer worked the graveyard shift.
- Patients were getting better,
and then all of a sudden, they died.
- It's the same as someone walking down the street
and indiscriminately shooting people.
- He admitted to his heinous crimes...
- This guy's confessing to murder at the hospital.
- He stated he stopped counting
after 50 or 60-- didn't say it stopped.
He just said he stopped counting.
- The drugs that he had used couldn't even be detected.
- It's the perfect murder.
- But was allowed to walk free.
- It was completely backwards than a normal case.
- But the problem was that we didn't have a victim.
If we don't have enough evidence of a crime,
you're gonna have to release them.
- Could police stop one of the most
prolific murderers of all time?
- Police said, "The court has issued a court order
to have your mother's body exhumed."
- It's just like something out of a scene of a movie.
We're gonna start digging up graves--
my worst ---- ing nightmare.
- As a doctor and certified expert
for the California Medical Board,
I know first-hand 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.
Usually, when a homicide is committed,
investigators first have a body,
then start looking for a suspect.
But that's not what happened
at Glendale Adventist Hospital in Southern California.
In a rare twist, detectives thought they knew
who was killing patients at the medical facility,
but they lacked the bodies or evidence
to prove that a crime took place.
- I got called into the chief's office and he said,
"Someone is killing patients
at the Glendale Adventist Hospital."
- Glendale Adventist Hospital
said they received a phone call
from this individual whose name was Grant
who said that a respiratory therapist up at Adventist
is killing patients by lethal injection.
- He wanted $50,000 for this information.
My first thought was, somebody's trying to extort
the hospital with, you know, potentially false information.
How much credibility do you give to that?
And then my other thought was,
what if the information is true?
Then we have someone killing patients in a hospital.
- Well, my parents-- father was Emmanuel,
and my mother was Eleanora Anne.
My father died when I was 12,
and my mom, Eleanora,
just went to pieces-- started drinking,
continued to smoke.
Sometime in the early '80s,
my mom made a significant change,
but at that point,
she had deteriorated physically.
Her respiratory conditions
eventually became diagnosed as
chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, COPD,
which would cause her to have bouts of pneumonia
fairly regularly,
and she would often wind up
in this hospital to get that treated.
- Glendale Adventist-- it's been a residential area
over on the east side of town.
It is the largest private employer in the city,
so it was a very big institution,
big hospital, well-known.
- The hospital was very professional.
They had respiratory therapists
to meet the needs of anybody who came into the hospital.
- A respiratory therapist is a person who
specializes in helping patients breathe,
and for patients like Eleanora Schlegel,
this routine breathing therapy
resulted in improvements in their quality of life.
- In 1996, I went to see my mom at the hospital
on New Year's Eve.
By then, she had pretty much recovered
from yet another bout of pneumonia,
She had mentioned that
the doctors thought she was well enough to go home,
but they told her that we'll keep her in the hospital
for another day or two.
On January 2nd,
there was a message on my answering machine,
and it was Glendale Adventist
wanting me to come and pick up my mom's stuff.
And they wanted to know
what should they do with the body.
I was...
numb.
It's hard to know what to think,
given that she had been
thought to be well enough to go home.
- Eleanora Schlegel's condition had been improving,
so why did she die so suddenly?
Unfortunately, her death did not raise
any red flags for the hospital,
which put more lives in danger.
- My mom's name was Jean Coyle,
and she was a very happy lady.
She was always dancing
and listening to her country music
and she loved going to the beach.
She loved the horse races.
She was always smiling and having a good time.
She liked to travel.
Her sister used to call her "Gypsy Jean"
'cause she was always going from place to place
and hooking up her U-Haul and moving here and there.
She was a smoker.
The smoking affected her.
She quit smoking when she was 50
and then later on, she started, like, getting--
she thought it was asthma,
but they said it was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,
or COPD, then as time went by,
she would get hospitalized more
and she was just coughing and wheezing.
I'd bring her to the hospital and they'd say,
"She's not doing good. You have to come down here.
We're gonna have to put her on a breathing machine."
Once my mom went to the hospital
and then she did her breathing treatment,
they just put her to the ICU just for observing her.
They were assuring me that she would be fine.
The ICU can be pretty scary at night.
The evening's more quiet. It's less people, you know.
Things are closed.
One night, I got a call from a nurse saying that
"Your mom was having a code blue.
We don't know why."
- Code blue in the hospital triggers certain personnel
to respond to perform life-saving measures
to someone that is basically dying,
and they have a whole protocol as to how to deal with that.
There was code blue called on Jean Coyle,
and they resuscitated her and brought her back.
- I was kinda shocked,
think that maybe she had a heart attack.
Then in the morning, she called me
and we talked about what happened to her.
She said, "Somebody was trying to do something to me."
It was just, like, you know,
somebody had come to her bedside and did some stuff,
and then all of a sudden, she just went out.
I didn't really take it seriously.
You wouldn't think anybody was gonna do something.
- Thankfully, Jean Coyle survived
and made a full recovery
and reported this encounter to other hospital staff.
No one believed her at first, but soon,
her suspicions would be validated.
Coming up...
- He says, "This guy's confessing
to a murder at the hospital"-- my worst ---- ing nightmare.
- We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of people
that potentially could've been murdered.
- Every death in the hospital
in the last ten years was gonna have to be looked at.
- If this gets out-- someone's killing people at a hospital--
it's gonna just explode.
- It was one year after
Jean Coyle's cardiac arrest,
and Eleanora Schlegel's death when Glendale Adventist
received a suspicious call from a man named Grant.
He demanded $50,000 in exchange for information
about a killer at the hospital.
Officers quickly moved in to investigate.
- We went out to interview Grant
to see what information he has,
if it's credible information,
and if it's direct evidence, or is it, you know,
just assess it.
- Tony and I went to Grant's house.
I knocked on the door
and somebody inside just cracked the door open,
so it was a little dark inside.
I couldn't really get a good look at the guy.
I briefly explained why we were there.
Grant said he was friends with one of the
female workers at the hospital.
Grant had overheard in a conversation
involving all the workers-- there was an allegation
that someone was killing patients.
He said, "If you read me the list of the workers there,
I can tell you," so we had read him the names on the roster.
- He looked at it,
and he said that his name was Efren Saldivar.
- Detectives went to Glendale Adventist
in search of witnesses to corroborate the story.
- We didn't want word getting out at all because
if the employees started to talk to each other
at the hospital,
we knew word was gonna get back to Efren.
So, we were talking to as many people as we could
without putting out too much information.
- We found out that Efren worked graveyard shift,
or what they called "nocturnals,"
which was from 11:00 at night till 7:00 in the morning.
- Bob Baker was one of the respiratory therapists
that we had spoke with and he had indicated that
he was also suspicious of Saldivar as well.
- Bob didn't want anyone to see us talking to him.
He asked us to meet him in the parking lot.
And it was a dark parking lot.
Bob was smoking a cigarette.
Every time he took a drag on the cigarette,
he would be looking around as if looking over his shoulder.
It was very unusual as far as interviews go.
- I thought Bob was uptight,
you know, very concerned about his job.
He felt that something was going on.
- Bob Baker probably gave us the most information
about why he believed there was something going on.
He says that Efren Saldivar
was killing patients, suffocating them.
It started many years ago.
- Bob Baker talks about playing a practical joke
on Efren,
and the practical joke was that he, you know,
pried open Efren's locker at work and was gonna
take all of Efren's things out of his locker
and switch them with somebody else's locker.
However, when he pries open Efren's locker,
he sees controlled substances that are, you know,
monitored by the hospital
and are only accessible to certain individuals.
Nobody in the respiratory therapy department
should have access to those or be in possession of them.
- At this stage in the investigation,
detectives had no direct proof of criminal activity,
only a name-- Efren Saldivar.
That's when they decided to call the hospital worker
down to the police station.
- As things turned out that night,
there was nobody else at the station.
When I saw him,
I had a little bit of a sinking feeling
but I was like-- just by his demeanor.
It was almost like he had-- was overdosing on caffeine.
He was very, very anxious.
I got the feeling he wanted to tell me something.
It was like he--
maybe he had to get something off of his shoulders.
And so, I knew there was something to the case.
I told him that there was an allegation
that he was killing patients,
and my impression is, he was holding back.
He knew how much information he was gonna give,
but he was now being careful. I explained to him.
I said, "One of the ways we can clear you is with a polygraph."
He didn't give me the chance.
He starts telling me how
six months after he'd started the job
nine or ten years earlier,
a patient had been taken off life support.
The doctor had already told the family that
the patient was dead, and when he went in,
he saw that the patient was still alive.
He thought, you know, we can't have this.
To quote him, he said he suffocated the patient.
And I was like, beyond belief.
So, I just had to keep him talking
to get to the point where he gave me something
we could use to make a case against him.
I knew it was gonna be a long night.
- Coming up...
- We have 48 hours before we have to release him.
- The problem was we didn't have a victim.
We literally had nothing. - We found documents
that he put his name in as Dr. Kevorkian.
- It's just like something out of a scene of a movie.
We're gonna start digging up graves.
- Efren Saldivar's admission
that he suffocated a patient
rattled Detective Will Currie.
He immediately brought in his colleagues to strategize
how they could put this alleged killer behind bars.
- I get a phone call from Will and he says,
"This guy's confessing to a murder at the hospital"--
my worst ---- ing nightmare.
As a police officer, when you look at that interview,
there's a couple things.
You don't know the background of Efren Saldivar.
We don't know if he has mental health issues.
We don't know if he's using drugs but,
you know, people will make statements that aren't true
to police officers all the time.
- As we continued to interview him,
everybody's thinking, is Saldivar crazy?
Does he have emotional issues?
Does he have psychological issues?
Is he a murderer?
Is he a cold-hearted killer?
You know, all the things go through your mind.
- My whole read on Efren Saldivar at the time
was he basically let the cat out of the bag,
but it was like, okay, well, let's--
you know, let's talk about.
It's getting to numbers, you got names, or rooms,
or tell me a little bit about it.
- Efren Saldivar then told us he started killing patients
nine years ago.
- You know, it came down to, "Well, is more than a hundred,
or less than a hundred?"
What he stated was that he stopped counting
after 50 or 60-- didn't say it stopped.
He just said he stopped counting.
- Saldivar said he used Pavulon,
and had to even spell them for--
for Will Currie to write them down in his notes.
And Will didn't know, and I didn't know
what these drugs meant, what they do.
- Pavulon is an extremely powerful drug.
It's primarily used to relax
the respiratory muscles during surgery.
Once administered, however, patients can't breathe
unless they're put on a ventilator.
If patients are not artificially given oxygen,
they will immediately suffocate and die.
- He was playing out that
it was euthanasia-- mercy killing.
The population of a hospital
has a good percentage of old people, and so,
he wasn't doing it out of randomness
just to murder people.
It was more to help them die.
- It's something that, you know, you don't expect to hear.
We think that people are working in a hospital
because they are dedicated to saving people's lives,
and treating them, hopefully getting them well
so that they can go on and living their lives.
The problem was that we didn't have a victim.
We literally had nothing.
There was no evidence of the crime,
so you have to get to the truth.
- We decided we have no choice.
We have to book him. You can't let him leave.
So, he ends up getting booked down to jail for murder
based on his statement.
That's it.
- Police believe Saldivar's confession
and consider him a threat to the community,
so they had to do something to keep him off the streets.
Once booked, detectives had only 48 hours
to find enough hard evidence to charge him with a crime.
If they didn't, the suspect would walk free.
- It was completely backwards than a normal case.
We had a suspect confessing first,
and now we have to prove the crime.
- There's a lot of work in front of us.
We're gonna have to follow up
on some of these hospital interviews.
- But we have 48 hours before we have to release him.
So hopefully, in 48 hours,
we can collect some kind of evidence that will help
maybe keep him in jail and charge him.
And I got with Will Currie and we decided
here's our course of action.
The first-- I did a search warrant on his locker at work
and we found documents that he was doing sample testing
on a machine at work,
and he had to put his name in for this test case or whatever.
And he put his name in as Dr. Kevorkian.
- Dr. Jack Kevorkian, obviously at that time
had been in the news because
he was assisting people in committing suicide
by lethal injection or by giving them medication.
And so, that was a look into, you know,
Efren's state of mind.
It was just another little piece
of circumstantial evidence
that made us feel like we were heading in the
right direction and that there was some validity
to what it was that we were looking into.
- A team was sent to Saldivar's house
to conduct a search warrant.
- Bear in mind, we still didn't really know
what we were looking for-- it was very general--
so basically, the officers who went up there
took everything they could that was related
to the medical field and there was an item amongst that
which turned out to be quite important.
- But one of the things that the officers recovered
out there was a drug called Versed.
And Versed is a controlled substance,
and it's not something that a respiratory therapist
would have in their possession or would use
in their job at the hospital.
Versed is a drug that is used
by anesthesiologists or a doctor
and it causes a patient to be relaxed
and drowsy for a medical procedure.
And we knew that that wasn't something
he was supposed to have.
- We got a hold of the licensing board.
They had a hearing pretty fast to revoke his license.
- We're not gonna get-- I knew.
We're not gonna get a warrant and arrests without a body.
Everybody he killed is in the ground.
I mean, right there, you're talking about exhumations.
If he killed people from nine years ago,
I already know we're gonna be dealing with bones,
very few samples to be collected,
and people that are buried, so, you know,
I knew it was just not like anything else.
I knew it was gonna take a while.
- We were able to hold him for 48 hours.
I remember the DA showing up and he goes,
"You got nothing."
We're not telling him he committed a crime.
We need to prove that the crime happened,
and you can use the confession to corroborate that.
- He said, "You don't have evidence of a crime.
You're gonna have to release him."
- Coming up...
- This is the worst nightmare unfolding here.
Every death in the hospital in the last ten years
was gonna have to be looked at.
- After word gets out and Saldivar is basically
being strung about as a murderer,
he goes on nationally broadcast shows.
- He recanted. He said that
he was under the influence of Valium at the time.
- Glendale police detectives
felt frustrated that
they couldn't find corroborating evidence
to back up Efren Saldivar's confession of murdering
more than 60 patients.
The cops were forced to let him go until they had proof.
- I went downstairs, got Efren brought up,
and said that he was being released
and he was, you know, shocked...
Frankly, that we were gonna release him.
I told him he was free to go, and that, you know,
if we needed to, you know, contact him, we'd find him.
There was a long road that
we had to climb.
We had work to do.
- Without evidence of victims killed by Saldivar,
detectives were unable to charge him with a crime.
Investigators decided to
immerse themselves in this case,
combing through and cross-referencing
the names of patients who died
with a list of patients treated by Saldivar.
They sequestered themselves from all other cases
and focused on bringing the victims justice.
- We started talking about
what that investigation would entail.
You could see people in the room squirming in their chairs.
- I knew I had to put a team together
because it's gonna require a lot of interviews
and investigations with medical charts
and things like that.
- This is the worst nightmare unfolding here.
Every death in the hospital in the last ten years
was gonna have to be looked at.
- It was felt that it would be best
that we were not at the police department
because there's too many distractions.
The hospital said that they had a house
that we could use as our basis of operation
while we did our investigation.
And so, we were put at this off-site
right across the street from
Glendale Adventist Medical Center.
- They converted that house to our command center,
operations center, whatever you wanna call it,
pulled in all police lines
and computers and phones.
- We got some ribbing from the people that we worked with--
our peers-- because, you know,
there was a lot of speculation it was a waste of time,
we were never gonna find anything.
It was like climbing Everest.
You knew what you needed to do to summit,
and we just started the process.
The first thing I was thinking about--
if this gets out-- someone's killing people at a hospital--
it's gonna just explode in the media.
- I got a phone call, and it was a reporter.
And I went outside and I could see these trucks
as far as the eye could see.
- The California hospital worker
who says that he killed up to 50 terminally ill patients
remains in hiding this morning.
- Efren Saldivar told police he ended the lives
of 40-50 patients he thought looked like
they were ready to die.
- We were a little strategic about it.
I brought in some extra people to man the phones
and we created a clue sheet
because maybe the people that call in
would point us to a certain
suspicious death in the hospital,
so we could kinda key on those deaths.
I think we had, like, 500 calls the first day.
- Glendale Police, Allan.
- Police hotlines are inundated
with hundreds of calls from people asking about
patients who died in Glendale Adventist Medical Center
in the past decade.
- The hospital has fired Saldivar,
and the state suspended his license,
but until there's more evidence of a crime,
the self-proclaimed "Angel of Death"
remains a free man.
- I could see a blurb
on the 11:00 news about,
"If you have any information about a person
"who was at Glendale Adventist Hospital
and died in the hospital, call this number."
I just thought they--
detectives were doing their job.
I figured, you know, what are the chances
that she was one of the victims?
I just did what I felt I should have done,
so I dutifully called the number,
left a message, and figured, well, that's that.
- After word gets out and Saldivar is basically
being strung about as a murderer,
he goes on nationally broadcast shows.
- Did you kill any of your patients?
- No.
- Did you ever attempt to smother one of your patients?
No.
No, it's not-- it's not as--
it's not easy to kill a patient as it sounds.
It's not.
- Saldivar lays out the whole confession as a suicidal plea.
- He recanted.
He said that he was under the influence of Valium
at the time that he came in for the interview
and that he was depressed.
So, he wanted to confess to a crime
that he didn't commit,
and that if he'd get the death penalty if convicted,
and then the state could do for him
what he couldn't do for himself.
- Why on Earth would you make this up?
- 'Cause I wanted the system to do to me
what I couldn't do to me.
- I didn't believe it. I simply didn't believe it.
- He didn't kill anybody. He wanted to just go to jail.
He's unhappy with himself. He's miserable.
He just wants to get the death penalty.
- I wanted to die.
I wanted-- I--
before, I've tried.
I've tried,
but I don't have the courage.
- He was a very innocent-looking person who--
I would never pick him out as someone
who I would think would be-- have it all,
their appearance is someone who would be a mass murderer,
and in a sense,
he was really quite believable at that point in time.
He said this is all just something that he made up.
- The public seemed to believe Saldivar as well.
Once the story broke, a morning talk show host
called out the police department
for harassing an innocent man
in order to force a confession.
- I was pissed off. I was thinking, you idiot.
You have no clue what you're talking about.
This guy wouldn't shut up. I didn't coerce him.
It swayed a lot of opinions.
I remember going down to the hospital
and hearing one of the doctors walk by saying,
"You know, are we gonna waste the taxpayers' money on this?"
And that's an actual quote.
Even my own mother told, you know--
I came home and she said, you know...
She wagged her finger at me,
told me I was in a lot of trouble.
- Detectives couldn't believe Efren Saldivar
recanted his entire confession on national TV.
It made him look all the more suspicious
and prompted officers to sift through
thousands of medical records.
Investigators narrowed down the list of potential victims
by making sure they had documented proof that
Saldivar treated the patient,
and that a medical expert had verified
the death should not have happened.
- Looking at the medical charts,
we could see where Saldivar had treated a patient.
They were getting better,
and then all of a sudden,
they died.
We're getting closer to proving
these patients have been murdered.
- Coming up...
- Some of these patients were getting better,
and then all of a sudden, there was a drop.
- The coroner's office told us, "You can't test for Pavulon."
We didn't know what to do about that.
- We got a phone call from the detectives
and they came and they said,
"The court has issued a court order
to have your mother's body exhumed."
- For more than a year,
detectives in Glendale, California
kept Efren Saldivar under surveillance
while they continue the daunting task
of proving he murdered dozens of patients
while working as a respiratory therapist.
- The whole thing about this case was it was done backwards.
We were given a confession and
we had to go out and find the crime
and prove it.
- I mean, I slept at the office a lot of times where we had to,
you know, early morning and late interviews.
I mean, we all ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner there.
- I did one chart at a time.
And if the patient had very stable vital signs,
and the nurse's note indicated the patient
was doing very well, but then the next note said,
"Patient found dead in bed," that was a suspicious matter.
- Dr. Isaeff was really helpful in that,
you know, being a cardiologist,
he was able to point out to say, "You know what?
"Everything seems fine to this point, but look.
"There's been a sudden event over here that's
consistent with somebody giving a paralyzing drug."
- Pavulon is a paralyzing agent,
but we give this medication
to patients who've already been sedated,
are on a ventilator where the breathing
is being taken care of,
but is also given with sedation
to keep the patient comfortable.
You don't want a patient waking up
who's on Pavulon only and not sedated.
It doesn't have any effect on vision.
It just paralyzes you so you can't move.
That would be a terrifying experience because
there would be a time before
you actually lost consciousness.
- Some of these patients were getting better.
They were improving and then all of a sudden,
there was a drop in their vital signs.
And so, that is suspicious because that is something
that would occur if that drug, Pavulon,
was administered.
- In order to charge Saldivar with murder,
investigators need to find patients
who were not prescribed Pavulon by the hospital staff
but inexplicably had the drug in their systems.
The problem was that there was no known test
to detect the drug in the human body,
especially one that had been in the ground
for more than a year.
- The coroner's office told us, "You can't test for Pavulon."
We didn't know what to do about that at the time.
- The bottom line is,
it's gonna be tough to get a prosecution.
- I believe it was the DA.
He came up with Dr. Andresen's name.
- Brian Andresen was the--
the chief forensic person for
Lawrence Livermore National Lab,
and they have all this cutting-edge technology
and science going on there.
It's a unbelievable facility.
So, I spoke with Brian Andresen
and he was tasked with
number one, answering questions.
Can we find these drugs from bodies that were in the ground?
- I was initially told that Pavulon was
a target molecule to look for,
so I went to the literature
to see what was known about Pavulon.
And then what I did is I took a sample of Pavulon,
put it in tissue samples,
and then tried to work up procedures
to isolate it out of decomposed tissue samples.
- It's an uneasy feeling because
if we came up with nothing in the end,
it was like, you know,
it would've been on our shoulders
that we were given everything we needed,
everything we asked for, and then we didn't find anything.
- Luckily, I lived close by,
so I would start in the morning,
and go have dinner and stay late at night.
So, every day, it was like 18 hours
for week after week after week--
many, many hours of laboratory work
to just get something that'll work--
mainly because I got the feeling from the police
that this was really important,
so I put a lot of effort into
trying to get the analytical procedure to work.
The protocol was developed like a liver sample,
the pig liver sample.
I injected 25 nanograms of Pavulon.
I could then keep-- take forward and do more analyses at it.
- I can't even over exaggerate
how overwhelming that is.
You're trying to learn how to read a medical chart,
learn medical terminology,
learn how to even intelligently talk to a doctor.
You wanna ask them questions where they don't look at you
like you have no idea what you're talking about.
- I did so many different experiments
that it just finally just worked,
and then you get-- where you go back and you try it again
and it worked a second time, and it worked a third time.
And so they said, "Okay, we're going to really
"put some effort into getting you a set of patients
to exhume and look at their tissue samples."
- We just proceeded with the theory,
if there were deaths, if he killed people,
let's go after the bodies that
have least deteriorated in the ground,
and that would be the most recent year or two.
We got it down to 117 deaths
that occurred while Saldivar was on duty.
Another criteria was that,
did the patient receive Pavulon
while they were in that hospitalization?
And if they did,
we probably were not gonna choose that case because
finding a positive wouldn't tell you anything.
We can't say it was administered illegally.
And then from there, let's pick the 20 strongest cases.
- I got a phone call from the detectives
and this one seemed more serious.
"We need to come to your house.
We need to talk to you about something."
And they came and they said, "The court has issued
a court order to have your mother's body exhumed."
- This was definitely something
out of the realm of what we were used to.
It was very uncomfortable telling, you know,
family members that we were gonna be
exhuming a family member the following morning.
- I kinda tried to piece together a whole timeframe
of how this slow-motion train went,
and I just thought,
you guys have to do what you have to do.
And I don't really need to be there,
don't really need to revisit all of this.
But...
I need to know if my mom had been murdered.
- Glendale detectives
sacrificed 14 grueling months
and pored through hundreds of medical records
in order to figure out which patients died
at the hand of Efren Saldivar.
Once cops whittled down the list of potential victims,
families received the startling news
that their loved ones would be exhumed
in order to find evidence of Saldivar's crimes.
- Days turned into months while doing the investigation.
Finally, in the middle of 1999,
we go to the exhumation phase,
and let's pick the 20 most suspicious cases.
We knew that this was a big turning point.
If we find the drug in this tissue
once we exhume the body,
we knew that would make the case.
- Just like something out of a scene of a movie.
We're gonna start digging up graves, you know?
It's just kind of morbid to even think about.
And so, we're there.
The crew-- the gravediggers were there,
and they show up with a tractor.
- At the coroner's office, our team would be there,
cracking the seal of the casket and
what you see in there was so different from case to case.
Some had tissue. Some had not-so-much tissue.
- Now, let me tell you something.
The coroner's office is not pretty.
It stinks. It smells.
There was this rosemary bush, and we'd pick a piece
of fresh rosemary and we'd stick it in our mask
so we could just smell the rosemary instead of
the decay that you smell inside the coroner's office.
For me, it was-- I was doing my job.
And if this individual was murdered,
I wanna bring, you know,
the individual who did this to justice
for this victim and for the family.
- Then the following day, we would pick up the samples
from the autopsy and drive them to Dr. Andresen at
Lawrence Livermore Lab and hand them directly to him.
- They drove the samples up to the forensic science center
every-- I think it was every Thursday.
And then each patient, again, had 15 samples,
real samples, then there was controls, blanks--
and it took hours, hundreds of hours.
- The pressure was on.
Not only was there a very slim chance
of finding Pavulon in the tissue samples,
but if all the tests came back negative,
cops would have nothing to show
for their year's worth of work.
- We just had no real solid hope
that we would find Pavulon.
- We were actually up at the lab dropping off samples
and Dr. Andresen was walking us through
everything he was doing, and he called us over
to his mass spectrometer.
He had just put a sample in there,
and he's-- as we were standing there,
he says, "High five. We've got Pavulon."
We got a hit on this case,
which was amazing to see.
- Before this revolutionary moment,
it was impossible to detect Pavulon in the human body.
Dr. Andresen literally created
new forensic science,
and it was this integral piece of evidence
that broke the entire case wide open
for Glendale detectives.
- There were 20 patients exhumed.
Six of the patients had Pavulon,
and according to the police department,
these patients were never supposed to have been
therapeutically given Pavulon,
and therefore, the only conclusion you can give
is that someone surreptitiously gave them Pavulon,
leading to their death.
- Getting six hits out of 20 potential cases
is a number that we never imagined we would get.
We'd be lucky if we get one or two.
- It got to the point where we felt we had enough
to put Saldivar under arrest.
We had the guy saying he did this to patients.
We got him on duty at the time.
We've got the patient dying with Pavulon in their system,
and we've got no medical reason
that it should be in that patient's system.
- The phone call came,
and it had been determined that
my mother was one of the six
named murder victims,
that they had found
Pavulon in her system.
- When you have to go and tell the families that,
"It looks like your loved one was murdered,"
it's--
it was traumatic for them.
It's traumatic.
- Detectives tracked Saldivar's whereabouts
during the entire investigation
so they could bring him into custody
as soon as they had enough evidence.
On January 9th, 2001,
he was arrested and charged with
six counts of first-degree murder.
- I was the one who arrested him.
He was working in construction at the time
out in the San Fernando Valley.
He put up no resistance.
We put him in the police car
and we transported him to the police department.
- Saldivar came upstairs and then he started confessing
and he was a little more forthcoming on this interview.
And we got into motive,
which was sort of a shock for all of us.
It wasn't mercy killing at all.
He blamed it on workload.
- The criteria that he used
to try and kill people was
if they were a nuisance or bothersome.
It was just, for him, a crime of opportunity,
someone in his way of getting
what he needed done that day.
You know, "I have to go deal with somebody right now,
"and I don't have the time and they're old,
and it's time to die."
- He was pretty cold-hearted about it,
the way he-- he just said, you know,
if there weren't enough therapists on duty,
that someone was gonna die.
- It's inconceivable that Efren Saldivar's excuse
for killing patients was to lessen his workload.
This completely goes against the selfless nature
of those who choose to go into the healthcare field
to improve the lives of their patients.
- In the final interview after he was arrested,
I asked him specifically about Jean Coyle.
And he said he remembers her.
He remembers trying to inject her,
but it was more of a, you know, half-hearted attempt.
- I'm angry about what he did, and, you know,
why he chose to do that.
But he called his self the "Angel of Death"
because he caused a lot of pain to a lot of people.
- It's nothing different than someone walking down the street
and indiscriminately shooting people.
It's murder by way of a syringe.
- You know, we believe that he killed more than 50 people.
It's something that we'll never prove.
You know, you never get the complete truth,
but Efren Saldivar
fits the definition of a serial killer.
- Think about if you had your mother or your father
who you are visiting in the hospital
and you're very concerned about,
and then you find out this happened to them.
I don't know how a surviving relative
ever will get over that because
it's common knowledge that patients are in the hospital.
They're vulnerable,
and they depend upon us
to be ethical, to do our jobs.
- After the investigation, I got diagnosed with cancer,
so I had to be treated at the hospital.
I had to be put under, so in the back of my mind,
I'm always questioning...
Who's treating me?
I wanna trust them. I do trust them.
But there's always gonna be that little,
you know, little sliver of doubt.
That was 11 years ago and, you know,
I'm, you know, still here today.
- I thought it was a bit ironic
because by getting life
instead of the death penalty,
he avoided the very agent
that he used to murder his victims.
Pavulon was, at that time,
one of the three cocktail drugs
that were used for lethal injection.
So, he avoided that,
but the main thing that I was satisfied with
was justice was served.
- Jean Coyle is the only known patient
to have survived an attempted murder by Efren Saldivar.
In April 2002, Saldivar plead guilty
to murdering Eleanora Schlegel and five others,
but is suspected of killing more than 60 people.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of the investigative team,
this diabolical serial killer
will never harm another patient again.
He is currently serving six consecutive life sentences
without the possibility of parole.
For more on "License to Kill," go to oxygen.com.