Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - Night Shift I 1. Code Blue

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

In the summer of 1992, the number of unexpected deaths is increasing at the Columbia Veterans Hospital. Whispers and rumors fill the halls: Is this coincidence …. Or something far darker? And could someone on staff be involved? Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Witnessed show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. To connect with Night Shift's creative team, plus access behind the scenes content, join the community at Campsidemedia.com/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Witnessed, Night Shift. Before you dive in, if you want to listen to the whole story uninterrupted, you can. Unlock the entire season ad-free right now with a subscription to The Binge. That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Witness show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. One Friday afternoon in the spring of 1992, an ambulance pulled up to a hospital in Columbia, Missouri. The doors of the ambulance opened, and an elderly man got out. The man's name was Melvin Carver, and he was 85. Melvin was a veteran of World War II.

When he needed a doctor, he went to the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Columbia, the VA. It was a government building built in the early 70s, boxy and plain, tan brown brick. Inside, the walls were painted pale blue. The place smelled of disinfectant. The ambulance had brought Melvin from a rural nursing home several hours away. But Melvin's problem wasn't an emergency. He simply had an ulcer on his toe, a complication of diabetes. And the ambulance was just the best way to give Melvin and his bad toe a ride. By the time a surgeon at the hospital had patched up Melvin's toe, it was getting late.

So the patient was left at the VA hospital late on a Friday afternoon with no place to stay. The ambulance had gone home. He had nothing, you know. This is Jan Swaney. She was a doctor at the hospital back then. So he got admitted to the hospital that late afternoon because he needed a bed to stay in overnight.

We had a slang term for that called a social admission. Not that he was ill enough to require a hospital bed, but he needed a hospital bed like he needed a room. He needed a bed and a room and three meals and all that. This wasn't totally out of the ordinary. This sometimes happened. The VA is government-funded health care. It may not be the fanciest, but they provide good, solid care. Melvin's doctor got him a bed on the fourth floor on the east wing. It was a ward for patients who were not in critical condition.

He was in a standard patient bed and he wasn't being monitored on any machines. In other words, he was stable. The patient had advanced Alzheimer's disease and was nonverbal. Yet we had a medical record on him, so we knew a bit about the patient's history, and we knew what he needed overnight. Within a day or two, the ambulance would return and give Melvin a ride back to the nursing home. He spent the night in the hospital.

First thing the next morning, Dr. Sweeney arrived on the floor to do rounds. She was the attending physician for the ward where Melvin was staying, a room on the fourth floor, East Side, also known as Ward 4 East. She and a team of residents and interns began their rounds, the morning routine of visiting each patient, checking in on them and checking their vitals. They headed to Melvin's room.

We went in to see the patient, and I remember him being in no distress. He made eye contact with me. He was not verbal, but he was cooperative. All his vitals were normal. His labs had been drawn the night before. Everything was normal. The plan of care for Melvin was basically just wait till his ride showed up. He didn't need anything else. Dr. Swaney left

Melvin, continued down the hall to check up on her other patients. We're still rounding. We're just down the hall doing rounds, seeing a few other patients. So we were probably only 30 or 40 feet away because rounds sort of proceed slowly, right? When about an hour later the coat blue is called. Suddenly Dr. Sweeney got a page on a paper. It was Melvin's room. Dr. Sweeney sprinted back down the hall. So we're just back in the room and he's blue and pulseless and he's not breathing and he's pulseless. So he's dead. But there was still hope.

It's a code blue. It's a chance to bring the person back to life. During code blues, a lot of things happen very quickly, all at once. There's a lot of commotion, but there's also a protocol. Someone grabs the crash cart, and the AED is pulled out to jumpstart the heart. There might be CPR. The nurse had started the code blue process, of course, and was at that point, I think, bagging the patient to get air into the lungs.

And I had to decide right away whether we were going to proceed with the code or stop it. Dr. Swaney knew the efforts to bring someone back to life can be hard on a body, especially one that is old and frail. He had an advanced state of Alzheimer's disease, and in my determination, I thought the death was a natural death, and that we wouldn't be doing him any favors to try to extend his life a short period of time.

So I called off the code. At Dr. Swainey's signal, the team stopped what they were doing. She pronounced the patient officially dead. The patient is extremely memorable to me. It's such an improbable death that it has stuck with me all these years. And I had just seen him an hour before and he was seemingly at a baseline state. Usually right after a patient died and there wasn't much of a talking mood in the room. The nurse would be going about his or her business and I would go about

my business and there would be no interaction. But after Melvin died, something was different. The nurse who'd been caring for Melvin, a pale, balding young man and all white, said something to the doctor. And I remember vividly the nurse saying to me, thank you, Dr. Swaney, when I called off the code. What did the nurse mean by thank you? Was he thanking Dr. Swaney for trying to save the patient?

For making the tough call not to proceed? Or for something else? There's a reason that small moment still haunts Dr. Swayney. She didn't know it at the time, but the polite young nurse would become the center of a vast conspiracy, one involving dozens of people mysteriously dying on Ward 4 East. They might have just been sick old men ready for their final breath, or it might have been something darker and much more unnatural. It was here at the Harry S. Truman Veterans Hospital in Columbia, Missouri, that an unusual

number of patients had died on ward 4E. The FBI concluded many of the deaths were suspicious. This is a case from the very, very beginning that has been botched by everybody, not just the FBI, but everybody. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, you're listening to Witnessed Night Shift. This is episode one, Code Blue. What does possible sound like for your business?

It's having to spend to power your scale with no preset spending limit. Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. What's it like to trade crypto on Kraken? Let's say I'm in a state-of-the-art gym surrounded by powerful looking machines. Do I head straight for the squat rack? I could, but this gym has options, like trainers, fitness pros, botters to back me up. state-of-the-art gym surrounded by powerful looking machines. Do I head straight for the squat rack?

I could, but this gym has options, like trainers, fitness pros, botters to back me up. That's crypto on Kraken, powerful crypto tools backed by 24-7 support and multi-layered security. Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Not investment advice, crypto trading involves risk of loss. See kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to registering Canada. My name is Jake Adelstein.

For the last 30 years, I've worked as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo. I mostly cover crime, and I've written a few books. My first book, Tokyo Vice, got turned into a TV show. If you've watched it, you might have heard the name pronounced Adelstein. But the correct German pronunciation is Adelstein, but the correct German pronunciation is Edelstein as far as I know. In Japan, it's pronounced three other ways. That's all the same to me by now. You might hear it pronounced a bunch of different ways in this podcast.

Anyways, I've built a life in Japan, and I never really felt compelled to cover anything back home in America. With one exception. Over 30 years ago, something mysterious had happened back in my hometown of Columbia, Missouri, back in 1992, the same summer that Melvin died. I was 23 years old then, just starting out as a journalist abroad. But it wasn't just that this story was happening in my hometown. I had a personal connection to the VA hospital where the deaths were occurring. My dad worked there as a doctor and I still remember how the hospital looked, how it smelled

like soap and cigarettes. I sort of grew up there. I had a great respect for this place, this hospital whose whole mission was to care for aging lawyers, now sick and vulnerable, all without charging a dime. So it alarmed me when I started to hear stories about mysterious deaths at the hospital. It was like a violation of this part of my childhood. It stuck with me.

I know it haunted a lot of other people in my hometown too, including my father, the doctor. So, without much to go on at first, I flew back home to Missouri and started to scare up some ghosts. My first lead was a man named Otis Leslie. He was a World War II vet, a family man, and exactly the kind of guy the VA is supposed to help. I went to visit his daughter, Kathy Robbins, with my producer Amy and reporting partner, Shoko. Kathy lived in a cozy apartment in Blue Springs, just outside of Kansas City.

We sat down in the kitchen, which looked like it was used often. There were handwritten dessert recipes and the faint smell of chicken stock mixed with potpourri. She had pictures of Otis laid out on the table. Some were in frames and others were in black and white and slightly frayed. That's his unit. He's the one circled. You can sort of see it. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, he has that splash-buckler look to him.

Daddy was born in Oklahoma and they lived in Texas and Oklahoma. And then, of course, you course, he went into the service. In World War II, Otis flew planes and served as a military police officer, an MP. They went through hell. He was infantry. And he never told you about what the fighting was like or any of that?

Not really. It was war. Otis was from a generation of soldiers where nobody talked about post-traumatic stress disorder. They were war heroes, not wounded warriors. There was no counseling because no one was around to treat the wounds you couldn't see. He said the only time he ever felt really, really bad was they had gone into a village, and I don't know if it was Germany or where, it had to be Germany. And there was

civilians there. And I guess this one little girl, she just kept screaming and carrying on and he kicked her. And he felt horrible afterwards. But, you know, that's the only, you know, it just really bothered him the rest of his life that he kicked that little girl. After the war, he met Kathy's mother. He got married. He gave up drinking. But he never gave up smoking. The military had handed out cigarettes freely to soldiers. Uncle Sam got a lot of people hooked. And then ended up paying to treat a lot of disease at the VA.

Do you remember, did he have a particular brand or whatever? Tarrington's. I've got the last pack. You kept his last pack? Yes, I did. Kathy carefully opened a black lacquered box and lifted out a red and the last pack. You kept his last pack? Yes, I did. Kathy carefully opened a black lacquered box and lifted out a red and white cigarette pack. Flattened, but other than that, almost perfectly preserved. 20 Class A cigarettes, made in Redsville, North Carolina.

The American Tobacco Company. Yeah. Yes, yes, yeah. I've that's it. I've always kept it. Kathy's dad had nicknamed her Pete, and little Pete idolized her father, always wanted to copy him. By the time she was a teenager, she'd started smoking too.

He always discouraged it, but I did it anyhow. But he was always telling me, Pete, you need to get off those dad dang things. He didn't cuss. You never cuss? No, I never heard him cuss. I never heard him cuss. He would say dag nab. Dag dang, dag nab it, dag burn. He had a good reason for wanting her to quit. He didn't want her to end up like him. He was, he coughed a lot. He had emphysema. He was on oxygen. And it didn't take a lot for his throat to bleed. Otis's emphysema was chronic and it would flare up from time to time.

In late June of 1992, he had another episode. He was throwing up blood, but what it ended up being was it was a cookie. You know the peanut cookies? The hard peanut cookies that scratched his throat. An ambulance drove him to the Columbia VA Hospital. And they thought, oh well maybe he's got TB, maybe he's got this. You know, they just kept him in there and kept running these these tests. And I guess they thought his oxygen was too low. They intubated him, and he was never happy about that. Mm, mm, mm, mm.

The VA is part of the promise the United States makes to those who fight wars on its behalf. It's one of two federally-funded healthcare providers in the U.S., the other being the Indian Health Care Service. The VA is tailored to the unique needs of veterans. It exists for them. And the Columbia VA was well regarded in central Missouri. Veterans like Otis came from far away to be treated there.

The VA was well equipped to deal with most things, even patients like Otis, who sometimes raised a little hell. He was on a ventilator, and he hated the ventilator. And he wanted it out, and if we weren't with him, he had to be restrained. And so when I was with him, I had untied his hands, and he was being good. And so I informed the nurse.

I said, I'm going back to the waiting room. Can you go back and tie his hands up? She goes, Yeah, I will. Well, she didn't. And in just that little bit of time, he ripped that thing out of his throat. But when he did, he brought the feeding tube up with, which aspirated into his lungs. And then about that time, he coded. And you know, I'm standing back against the wall and all these people are coming in flipping him upside down. Thank God they got him back. But he was close.

That's so scary. Did you hear them saying, like, what else? Be cold blue, cold blue. Oh, that's so scary. Did you hear them saying, like, with the last people, cold blue, cold blue? Oh, yeah. I mean, they were coming in from all over the place. Alarms were going off. Scared the shit out of me. The doctors stabilized Otis and got him hooked back up

to all the right machines. I said, oh, Daddy, what did you do? He goes, I took the dead thing out. I said, well, I can see that. But he was smiling until he caught it. He was very pleased with himself for ripping that thing out. Otis was a hell raiser, and probably in some ways he was amused by the chaos he had caused. But there was something else, a sort of sixth sense he had.

He was not comfortable being in there. He was ready to check himself out. He told me, he said, if I don't get out of here, Pete, I'm going to back to university to be your friend. I'm going so I can get Uber One for students. It saves you on Uber and Uber Eats. I'm there for zero dollar delivery fee on cheeseburgers, up to five percent off smoothies and five percent Uber cash back on rides. Just to be clear, I'm there for savings, not whatever you think university is for.

Get Uber One for Students, a membership to save on Uber and Uber Eats. With deals this good, everyone wants to be a student. Join for just $4.99 a month. Savings may vary. Eligibility and member terms apply. Otis Leslie survived that self-inflicted scare. The code blew. He stabilized quickly, and before long,

he was well enough to move to a different part of the hospital. He had finally gotten out of ICU and had been put in a regular room, and, of course, it was down the hall, the same floor, just down the hall. It was a private room. The new room was down the hall, the same floor, just down the hall. It was a private room. The new room was on 4 East, the same ward where that other elderly man, Melvin, had also been hospitalized.

Otis really wanted to go home. And before his wife left for the night, Otis asked her to gather all his belongings and put them in the car. She said goodbye and Otis said, I'll see you in the morning. My dad was supposed to go home the next day. He was finally getting out of that dag nab place. But then Cathy got an unexpected call from her mother. My mother called me, yeah, and she told me that daddy had died. And I got a hold of my sister and picked her up on the way and just drove to Columbia.

It was the middle of the night when Kathy and her family got to Otis' room. Her father, the guy who'd seemed so vibrant a day before, was gone. It was a bad night. He was... He was laying there and his mouth was open and his tongue was blue. The timing seemed like a cosmic joke. Otis had been sick for so long, and then right when things were looking up, when he was on the verge of going home, he'd crashed. I mean, it was a shock.

But it wasn't something that we weren't thinking could happen. You know, it was just, it was very quick. Kathy and her sister stood next to her father's bed, trying to comprehend that their father was no longer there. We're over here by daddy's bed and we're trying to have a conversation and he's just standing there staring at us. And he's just standing there staring at us.

Standing between them and the door was a young man. He had pale skin and he was silent. He was Otis's nurse. And he wouldn't leave the room and give us a minute to say goodbye. And it was my mom, my sister and I and he just stood there and watched us. It was awkward, upsetting the delicate emotional balance of the room. And it made me really uncomfortable. I mean I don't know why he wouldn't leave.

He just stood there and watched as you know we were trying to say our goodbyes and... Oh! I swear I wasn't going to do this. I'm fine. I'll be fine. But he wouldn't leave the room. And you know, it's like he was just enjoying watching us. Fall apart? Yeah. Kathy didn't get that man's name at the time,

this quiet young nurse working the night shift on ward 4 East. He was only meant to be a background character in her life. Kathy didn't get that man's name at the time, this quiet young nurse working the night shift on ward 4 east. He was only meant to be a background character in her life, a footnote to the overwhelming grief of losing her dad. But he wasn't comforting and he wasn't offering condolences. He was just there, lurking around. around. Lee Miller worked as a clinical nurse at the VA in the 80s and 90s. He remembers the night shift well.

It's quiet, you know, and there's a kind of person who likes working the night shift because they like the quietness. There's a kind of person who likes working the night shift because they like the quietness. There's no therapy. There are no physical therapists around, no occupational therapists, no psychologists, no dieticians. There's no meal service. So all you have is patients and nursing staff, basically. A time to relish the peace when both the staff and the patients appreciate not having many

people around to look over their shoulder. On these shifts, Lee would come in at midnight and go patient to patient, evaluating each one. He'd take people's vital signs, give medications, check people's IVs. He'd help people go to the bathroom or turn over in bed. On the night shift, there was even a little time to chill out. Yeah, I remember working with people who maybe brought knitting to work, and they would watch the call light system and knit for a few minutes, but they were there ready to respond.

If somebody needed something, they were there. Every once in a while, he'd hear a code blue over the intercom. Code blues are resuscitation attempts when somebody's heart stops beating and they stop breathing. Typically, I would say in a hospital, a nurse makes rounds, walks into a room, finds somebody not breathing, and calls a code. Essentially, you can say in that moment they're clinically dead, they're not breathing, and their heart's not beating.

So essentially the goal is to restore life. That's a harrowing scene and a favorite of primetime medical dramas, but not something that should ever be routine. I would say it was not unusual at all to go for a week and there wasn't one, maybe even a couple of weeks and there were no code blues. So they are infrequent. Eventually Lee became a manager overseeing other nurses. He did that for more than a decade. And over all those years it was the same story.

Code blues were infrequent. When they did happen, they happened in random places. So they might be in the operating room, they might be in the ICU, they might be in the parking lot. I don't ever remember a series of code blues from the same location. But then, in the summer of 1992, something changed. There seemed to be more code blues blaring through the hospital, and they were all coming from one place.

These codes are happening on Four East. Dr. Jan Swaney figured that the first ones to notice something was off would have been those on the Code Blue team, the staff who responded to the emergencies, like the respiratory therapist. So if you're the respiratory therapist who goes to work at night and you're running codes through the night, you're the first to know there's a

pattern here. And also the residents. They're running the codes and they're on call at night and they're the ones who are realizing, you know, something bad, there's some bad karma on Four East, right? So I believe that's where the rumors began. So I believe that's where the rumors began. It was all so strange, but at the same time almost metaphysical, not quite real. Hard to pin down. But by the end of the summer, everyone was talking about it. And in late August, the strange happenings on Four East had been going on long enough that news about them filtered to the very top of the hospital's leadership.

All the way up to the Chief of Staff, a guy named Dr. Earl Dick. He oversaw all the medical employees. If the VA is a ship, this guy, Dr. Dick, was the captain. But he was on his way out of town, so he turned to the chief of pathology. And here's the chief of pathology. It was probably a Friday that he said that he was leaving town, and when he left town, he would make me the acting chief of staff. Dr. Dick asked the pathologist to cover for him as captain while he was away.

Okay, sure, the pathologist thought. It'd probably be a normal, quiet week. But on his way out, this guy, Dr. Dick, gave the pathologist a truly bizarre homework assignment. And so he said to me, he was going out of town, he said, there's some rumor that there's some nurse killing people. Would you look into this?

You know, just your typical water cooler conversation about an alleged killer on the loose in your workplace. And I said, sure. I really didn't think much about it. The pathologist was skeptical. People died in hospitals all the time. He saw a lot of death. And he autopsied enough VA patients

to know they weren't the healthiest demographic in America. They have heart disease. They have brain disease. they have, you know, when they were in the military they were encouraged to smoke cigarettes, they were given free cigarettes, you know, I mean, really all the patients are sick. I mean, this was a hospital after all, and that's what sick people often do. They die. The idea of someone going around killing patients seemed so far-fetched to the pathologist, it just seemed highly unlikely that any medical professional someone hired to help people

would be killing patients. He thought that this sensational rumor would be resolved in no time and just blow over. But it didn't exactly go the way he thought it would. Not even close. More patients would die on the night shift. The deaths would spark rumors, accusations and fear. I know all about this because I know the pathologist. Quite well in fact. He's my dad.

For the next decade, my dad, Eddie Edelstein, found himself wrapped up in this case. He would face the Herculean task of figuring out why patients were dying in droves on Ward 4 East. Maybe it wasn't a virus, or cancer, or Uncle Sam's damn cigarettes. Maybe the unthinkable was happening, and there was a serial killer wearing a staff badge, hiding in plain sight. There's really weird shit here. No, I know. I mean, like I said, somehow at a very high level,

the thing was to close this case down at a very high level. This season on Witnessed, Night Shift. I recall it being somewhat surreal. I can't believe this guy is sitting on this couch talking to me about this. Why is that a good idea for someone who's suspected of being a serial killer? And death followed him wherever he went, this man. It followed him. Here's the deal.

This type of stuff does not belong any medical care anywhere. We gave them death sentences in our facility. So they would rather see a whole bunch of innocent people killed than to do anything about it. I mean, my gosh, what do you want him to do? Clear out half the hospital? top of a witness show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first

of every month. Check out the Binge channel page on Apple Podcasts or GetTheBinge.com to learn more. The show was hosted by Jake Edelstein. It was written and reported by Jake Edelstein and me, Shoko Planbeck. Amy Planbeck is the producer. Elizabeth Van Brocklin is the managing producer. Michael Canyon-Meyer is our story editor. Factors like the director, the director of the show, and the director of the show, are the key to the show's success.

The show is a production of the producer. Elizabeth Van Brocklin is the managing producer. Michael Canyon-Meyer is our story editor. Fact-checking by Abukar Adan. Josh Dean is our executive producer. Sound design, mix, and original scoring by Erica Wong. Additional music from Mike Harmon and APM. A special thanks to Eddie Edelstein and Benny Edelstein. Thanks also to our operations team, Doug Slaywin, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, Destiny Dingle, and David Eichler.

Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Schaer. If you enjoyed Witnessed, Night Shift, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.