Genene Jones, Texas' infamous 'killer nurse,' is facing a new murder charge today, more than thirty years after she was sentenced to 99 years prison for killing a child by injecting her with overdoses of drugs, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
Jones, 66, is one of the most infamous killers in American history. She was suspected of killing as many as sixty infants and toddlers when she worked as a pediatric nurse in several hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices around the state in the late seventies and early eighties.
The new indictment comes 32 years after Jones was sentenced to 99 years in prison for killing 15 month old Chelsea McClellan, who had been taken to the doctors' office in rural Kerrville, northwest of San Antonio, where Jones worked as a nurse, to receive routine childhood inoculations, in August of 1982.
Witnesses at Jones' trial testified that several babies at the clinic 'had to be saved from life threatening emergencies' when Jones worked there.
Later, she was convicted in San Antonio of injecting a four week old boy with a potentially fatal dose of the blood thinner Heparin. That baby survived.
Bexar County District Attorney Nicholas LaHood says under a 'good time' law in place at the time of Jones' conviction which was designed to deal with prison overcrowding, Jones has a mandatory release date of next March.
"She is pure evil and justice warrants that she be held accountable for the crimes she committed," LaHood said. "Our office will attempt to account for every child whose life was stolen by the actions of Jones."
A grand jury in Bexar County on Thursday indicted Jones in the murder of 11 month old Joshua Sawyer, who died as part of a spike in pediatric deaths that occurred when Jones was working as a pediatric ICU nurse at what was then called Bexar County Hospital in San Antonio. A coroner's report revealed that the boy was injected 'with a toxic level of Dilantin,' which is a drug designed to stop convulsions.
Witnesses said at first, Jones' was driven by the desire to be seen as the heroic nurse who rescued dying children, a condition known as 'Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.' But later, experts said she became 'intoxicated' with the 'power of life and death' she wielded over children in her care.
There is no statue of limitations on murder cases, but LaHood says he is not troubled by the difficulty of getting a conviction 36 years after the case occurred.
"Our only focus is justice," he said.