Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - Night Shift I 4. Bodies in the Snow

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

The FBI isn’t getting the answers it wants from the living, so the Bureau hopes to find answers from the dead. Agents zero in on a male nurse as the main suspect, but struggle to get traction. Are they looking at the wrong guy? 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

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Campsite media. It's March 1993. Columbia Tribune reporter Rudy Keller is waiting inside his car in the brutal Midwest cold. He's parked in a cemetery in Fulton, a city about 20 miles east of Columbia. He's looking across an expansive frozen ground marked with headstones. And he's closely watching an open empty grave. And I had gotten a camera from somebody else at the tribune with a nice long lens.

And I waited and I waited and I waited and I waited. And finally, about 24 hours had elapsed. 24 hours among the dead, with the wind whipping the snow across this place of rest. But it's not a resting place any longer. Not for everyone. Rudy is waiting on the FBI. He knows that they're planning to return a body to this grave. It's the body of a man, a VA patient whose cause of death on ward 4 East is now in question. The agents had dug up the body a few days before,

and now they are supposed to put it back. Rudy hopes to snap a picture of the agents in the act. I knew they were in the middle of the exclamations. I knew that they hadn't been completed, and the Fulton police had come out and checked on me two or three times. And I was pretty much sure that the FBI knew that I was out there, and they weren't going to leave, and they weren't going to be there. It was kind of a waiting game. At cemeteries across Missouri, other grapes have been disturbed too.

The FBI is exhuming the bodies of 13 veterans they suspect may have died under suspicious circumstances. And all 13 had been receiving care from the same nurse, Richard Williams. These are people from all over the state. Raleigh, further south, up north in Randolph County. The FBI had been pretty blunt with the families of the dead. It was part of their investigation and they basically told them, you can give us permission or we can get a court order.

So the families agreed to an almost unthinkable thing, to have their loved ones unearthed. The bodies would then be sent to a medical examiner to determine if there was, indeed, foul play. Fed up with waiting, Rudy finally left his post in the cemetery Sunday evening. But when he got back on Monday morning, he found the grave had been sealed up. The agents had already reburied the body. He'd missed the moment.

But the body buried there had a story to tell investigators. A story few people wanted to hear. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, you're listening to Witnessed Night Shift. This is Episode 4, Bodies in the Snow. I'm Jake Edelstein. By the time the FBI took the drastic step of digging up 13 bodies, the Bureau had already been investigating the mysterious deaths at the Columbia VA for almost five months.

Back in late September of 1992, Rudy had helped break the news about the VA deaths to the public, and immediately there was a question of who should handle the case. Normally murder investigations are handled by local authorities. At the time, in the Columbia Police Department, the Chief of Detectives was a guy named Carol Heiberger. He's a guy, even though his name is Carol, and I know Carol well. He happens to be my sister's father-in-law. Anyway, the FBI called Carol to ask if the Columbia PD would like to handle the investigation.

Carol said back, do we want this case? Hell no! Absolutely not! We're just a small town police force. The VA is a federal institution and you're the FBI. You do it. No thank you. So instead of one local police department handling the case, what you had instead was

a big mess of government agencies converging on the scene. You had the Department of Veteran Affairs, the Office of the Inspector General, the United States Attorney of the Western District of Missouri, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That was a mouthful. But the main players here were the FBI, a powerful and intimidating presence ready to exact justice. At least that's how Rudy Keller saw them. The FBI has a great reputation.

I grew up at a time when the slogan was, the FBI always gets its man. I had no reason to suspect that the FBI would not do the laboratory work that they said they were going to do. But the G-men were sort of wearing their own handcuffs at the start of this investigation. Since the Bureau doesn't usually do murder cases, they had to find another way. And the reason they found was that it is a violation of your civil rights to kill you. Deprivation of life, liberty, and happiness. This situation sort of reminds me of the 1988 movie, Mississippi Burning, which was based on a true story of two FBI agents investigating the disappearance of civil rights activists.

In real life, nearly half the men who were arrested were found guilty of various violations of civil rights, but none for murder charges, even though many believed their real crime was murder. A violation of your civil rights was a five-year statute of limitations. That is the standard federal statute of limitations for felonies. For non-capital offenses, that is. So from the beginning, the five-year clock was ticking. Of course, everyone was sure that the FBI would wrap this up

way before the clock ran out. The FBI's mandate was, and I'm quoting here, to determine whether any evidence exists to suggest whether criminal activity may have been involved in any of the deaths. End quote. And with that word salad of a mandate as their rallying cry, the FBI stormed into the Columbia VA. The FBI's men in black presence was immediately felt.

Agents who looked and acted exactly as you'd imagine them The FBI's men in black presence was immediately felt. Agents who looked and act exactly as you'd imagine them with their stern looks and dark suits essentially took over a wing of the hospital. Nurse Lee Miller remembers it very well. I remember when they came and they actually occupied a suite of unused offices somewhere in the hospital. I don't remember running into them in the building. I think they kind of came in and out by a back door and just did their thing.

Their thing was conducting interviews with hospital staff, and they did hundreds of hours of interviews. One of the first people they talked to was Dr. Gordon Christensen, the epidemiologist who'd analyzed the deaths on Four East. At first, trying to get the agents to understand the data was frustrating. It was funny because I would meet with a bunch of people over and over and over again who knew nothing about this, whose view of statistics was that it's just, they're just numbers, they don't do anything. You can't prove anything by statistics.

But over the course of many meetings, Gordon felt like he was starting to make these skeptical agents understand that his analysis was hard evidence. It was evidence that seemed to point at one man. And so I would go through the data and the stories with the pictures and data laid out. And you could see their change in their demeanor go from, you know, skeptical, dubious, even sometimes lampooning to, oh my God, this is really, this is really true. So, the FBI took it under study. But when the FBI pulled the nurse himself, Richard Williams, in to be interviewed, he

vehemently denied the accusations, just as he had done before the hospital's ad hoc panel. And then Williams went a step further. In the interview, agents asked Williams if anyone might have it out for him. He had an immediate response. He told them they should look at a different nurse. Williams said that she might be the killer. We tried to reach out to this person, but we didn't get a response. So we will call this person Nurse Sally.

It's not surprising that Williams would point the finger at someone else. But here's the crazy part. He wasn't alone. Another person accused Nurse Sally as well. About a year and a half into their investigation in May 1994, the FBI interviewed a night shift nurse named Victor Kolder. He'd worked in respiratory therapy for 22 years and he painted a pretty rough portrait of life for patients and nurses on Four East. Victor passed away but we have the FBI's

summary of their interview with him and we asked an actor to read it. Four East was a ward where all the patients had chronic conditions, usually terminal conditions. We couldn't cure these people. We were just trying to keep them comfortable. The patients were hard to handle, and it was extremely hard on the nursing staff. At first, Victor was as surprised as everyone else by the spike in deaths on the ward.

He'd worked in at least eight hospitals over his career and never seen so many deaths occurring in a single ward. He said it became the topic of morbid jokes among the staff, probably not something any of them would be proud of, but understandable in such a high-pressure environment. Early on, Victor noted that one of the nurses laughing along with these jokes was Richard Williams. He said Williams didn't seem bothered by the deaths. But then the deaths kept happening, and it wasn't funny anymore.

Victor became extremely concerned and he felt he saw the same concern in Williams. I feel that Williams is a caring nurse. The guy works hard to help his patients. He's always professional and efficient during code blues. Victor speculated to the FBI that if a nurse was causing these deaths, it might not be Williams at all, but someone setting him up. And just like Williams, he pointed the finger at Nurse Sally. She's crazy enough to be capable of setting Williams up. She always worked the shift just before him, and I know she never liked him.

I don't know why she would have set him up, but I do know she was a bad nurse. She couldn't handle the pressure. I don't know why she would have set him up, but I do know she was a bad nurse. She couldn't handle the pressure. She'd get frustrated to the point where she couldn't even function on the ward. I've heard that being a nurse at the VA is like trying to cook an entire Thanksgiving dinner in an hour. You've got to roast the turkey, stir the mashed potatoes, and try not to burn the pumpkin pie all at the same time. But would a nurse who seemed to be in over her head have the skill to secretly set up another nurse?

And why would she do something like that? Kind of seems like a thing that would make her job more stressful, not less. And nurse Sally already seemed stressed as it was, especially when she was working with Richard Williams. This is an actor reading from the summary of her FBI interview. It seemed like there was always a crisis whenever I worked with Richard. There were no normal shifts with him. And there were so many deaths, way too many. Actually, I was worried I might get blamed for the patients dying.

I was honestly relieved when I took a few days off and the deaths kept happening while I wasn't on the ward. I was honestly relieved when I took a few days off, and the deaths kept happening while I wasn't on the ward. Most people the FBI interviewed didn't go so far as to openly suspect Williams. But Nurse Sally was different. She was very direct with the agents about how, initially, she thought he might be killing patients. She even told the FBI that she'd done some investigating of her own. I thought Richard might have been injecting patients with insulin in order to kill them.

So I checked their blood sugar levels to see, but everything came back normal. I never found anything unusual. The deaths were suspicious, but I don't believe Richard Williams killed any of these patients. I don't like him, but I think he's innocent." So ultimately, even Nurse Salley concluded she didn't think Williams had done anything wrong. And the FBI couldn't really use this sort of statement to build their case against him. Nurse Salley herself was never considered a suspect.

By this point, some of Williams' colleagues believed he was an angel of death. He had been removed from patient care. His name was on the front page of the newspapers. After all this, was it possible that the polite young nurse was actually just an innocent man? Would you answer a call for a reality TV show if you weren't allowed to ask what the show was about? If you want to be on the show, stop asking that question and get on with the auditions. And I said, well, obviously I can't do that.

Might be selling you my kidney. I don't know what it is. But in return, they promised you the adventure of a lifetime. I didn't want something horrible to happen to me. I didn't want to die. That's basically what I was thinking. I didn't want to die. Split Screen Thrillseekers is a new six-part series from Love and Radio, Vespucci, and CBC. Listen now. I'm not going 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. Months before the FBI came to Columbia to investigate, the head nurse on Four East knew she had a problem on her hands.

Her name was Cynthia Hall Pascaglia, or Cindy for short. She had a nurse on her staff who was having a bit of an emotional crisis. The nurse was Richard Williams. Cindy for short. She had a nurse on her staff who was having a bit of an emotional crisis. The nurse was Richard Williams. Apparently he was devastated by the frequency of people dying on his shift. Williams told Cindy that his patients kept dying one or two hours into his shift, late at night or in the wee hours of the morning. He reportedly told her that he thought that the evening nurse, the person on shift before him, was providing poor care to the patients.

When a patient died under his care, he felt like a failure. It was stressing him out, and all of these deaths were becoming too much for him to bear. Making things worse, Williams had heard the rumors calling him an angel of death. He seemed genuinely distressed. Cindy felt bad for him. So when in April or May Williams asked to be taken off Four East and put on some other ward, it seemed like a reasonable request. She thought that moving him off the ward would be better for everyone.

In a deposition Cindy later gave, she said she didn't have the authority to transfer Williams herself. So she put in a transfer request to her boss, the acting director of nursing. But the acting director denied the request, saying there was no reason to move Williams. Instead, Williams was told to stay put. He needed to stick it out on Cindy's ward for a full year. Now Williams was stuck on the ward where suspicious deaths had spiked and where many of his colleagues suspected he was a murderer. He requested to be transferred a second time. Williams, it seemed, just wanted to get off the ward. Again, Cindy took the transfer request to the acting director, and again it was denied. Cindy reassured everyone that Williams was a good nurse.

She stuck up for him. She even seemed to be on his side. Cindy explained to Williams, For ease just has a high death rate. It was part of the job. At some point in 1992, some hospital employees threw a staff party to honor one of the nurses. It was at this party, in front of everyone, that Cindy Pascaglia gave Williams a gift for good luck. It was a bit of a bizarre gift.

A troll doll. If you're as old as I am, you might remember these dolls. They were big in the early 90s. Small plastic figurines with exaggerated facial features. Think big nose, creepy uncanny grin. A troll doll typically has wild colorful plasticky hair that stands straight up. They're really ugly. You can kind of style the hair from mildly crazy to totally unhinged. Some people collect troll dolls, but I'm guessing this was probably the first one Williams ever

got as a gift from a co-worker. Maybe it was meant to be an amulet to ward off death, and she told everyone, go easy on him, he's having a hard time. It's hard to make assumptions about Cindy because we never spoke to her. When my reporting partner Shoko called her phone number, a man answered and said not to contact them anymore. We also emailed and sent her a letter and got no response. Sometimes I wonder what she was thinking during this period.

And maybe there was a time when she truly believed that Williams was just an unlucky guy, an awkward type who was in the wrong place at the absolute worst time. But at some point, something seemed to happen that changed her mind. Because a few months later, Cindy would find herself sitting in a meeting room in the hospital facing the three-person board you heard about earlier in the series. The three board members, her colleagues, questioned her about working with Williams. And judging from the transcript, Cindy was conflicted on how she felt about Williams. We had two actors read from the transcript. The first voice you'll hear reading is for

Gary Baker, the board chair, and the second voice is reading for Cindy Pascaglia. Can you tell us about Mr. Williams' role on 4 East and his practice? He came to me as a GNT the first part of January and passed boards, became an RN, and worked a while on the floor. He worked well with others and is very helpful. His nursing assessment skills that I could tell were very excellent. I saw no problem with his practice on reviewing them. Do you have any reason or reasons to think that Mr. Williams has harmed any patient? No, my gut feeling is he hasn't, but there have been several patients' deaths,

and he seems to be on shift when they've happened. So I do think it needs to be investigated. I don't, my gut feeling is he didn't do anything or isn't doing anything. But I think it's something that needs to be looked at because I don't know. On a gut level, Cindy didn't think Nurse Williamson harmed anyone. But then Lee Miller, the nurse appointed to the board, asked her if given all that, would she be fine with working with Williams again? When I pressed her, having said that you don't think

anything untoward is happening, would you be happy having Richard come back and be your night nurse again? And she said no. You know, so that to me was very telling. Lee had worked with countless nurses in his career. The only reason he could imagine someone would refuse to work with a nurse was if that nurse were incompetent,

incapable of performing the task required. But Lee had worked with Williams before. He wasn't a standout provider or anything, but Lee knew his skills were up to par. So He wasn't a standout provider or anything, but Lee knew his skills were up to par. So, it wasn't that. That to me was an alarming, alarming statement. If Cindy, who had previously defended the man, didn't want Williams back on her ward, it had to be about something else. But no matter how much the board pushed her, she

wouldn't accuse Williams of anything outright. There were many people interviewed by the FBI who saw in Williams an exceptional nurse. He was a hard worker. He was efficient, and he appeared to care a lot about his patients. People had their doubts that Williams was to blame, and as time crept on, those doubts began to spread. At one point, even Rudy Keller began to wonder. He'd been the first reporter to name Williams in print, but without clear answers from the

FBI, he started to question his own convictions. I'm not exactly sure what moment. I do remember just one evening where I was just completely at sea over the whole I don't know what triggered it But over the whole idea that I had you know, somehow wronged Richard Williams and to to the point where you know Didn't even know what I was doing anymore. What what am I doing as a reporter? You know, I've got no proof that this guy killed anybody." The VA had apparently firmly made up its mind that Williams was innocent. The administration completely exonerated him while the FBI investigation was still ongoing.

Then, they declared their investigation over and patted themselves on the back for a job well done. The local newspapers announced Williams' name had been cleared. But for the FBI, Williams was still a suspect, because that's what the data pointed to. But they also had an open mind. Statistics weren't enough. Their makeshift offices were in a corner of the hospital.

In one of the rooms, they had large calendars marked with all the dates that patients had died on Ward 4 East. The agents had bodies, but no murder weapon. And there was no way to be sure which of these deaths were natural and which were unnatural. They had to exhaust every lead, and it seemed they did exhaust every lead. They even investigated a nurse who was writing creepy poems about death and sending them to Richard Williams via email. But in the end, the FBI never suspected anyone but Richard Williams.

Special Agent Philip Williams, the FBI agent in charge of the case, said as much, since he has the same last name as Richard Williams, we'll call him Agent Phil. We tried to reach Agent Phil, but we couldn't get ahold of him. In 1997, he gave a deposition about the case. We asked an actor to read part of it. The lawyer asked him,

were there any other suspects ever even considered? I mean, we looked. To call them a suspect would be overstating. We looked at a lot of different people. We looked at the shifts and who worked the previous shift and that type of thing. But there wasn't anybody that stood out that you would have even elevated to the level of a suspect. We tried to contact Agent Phil, but did not get a response. The central agents working the case declined to speak with us, as did investigators who worked for the VA. I only heard back from one of them, Wayne Kessler, a special agent for the VA, who wrote a deep and detailed report on the deaths.

He sent me a short text that said, I am no longer interested in participating in any way shape or form with this. I have my reasons. It's a cryptic message and I still don't know what to make of it. Dr. Jan Swaney remembered the FBI investigation well. They established a rapport that was sort of informal, different than being deposed. It was chatty sort of interview, and they were agents who were professional, interested, sort of trying to problem solve and think about possibilities, brainstorm. And they were pretty transparent, too.

We were surprised to find out that the FBI followed up with Dr. Swaney and gave her notes of their interaction, which is way more follow-up than she got as an ad hoc board member. I was given a copy of the notes that the FBI had made when I was interviewed by them. There's something that's not in these notes that I have hung on to all these years. And it's part of this easy dialogue that was at times speculative with the FBI. And I had the opportunity to ask the agent, are these mercy killings? And the agent said, apparently not. Dr. Swaney said the agent expressed an opinion

that a person who could do this might instead fit the following profile. He has such a weak ego formation. He has such a weak identity that death, being able to cause a death, is something that is empowering to him. And so this maybe could be the motivation for killing people.

When Dr. Swinney heard this, she had a physical response. I probably get like this little tingling thing over my scalp, like, what? Yeah, and probably my eyes bug out a little bit. We had a lot of people tell us their theory about the alleged killer's motivations. There was everything from mercy killings, a classic, to more outlandish speculation, like someone being ordered by higher-ups to kill people so that they could open up more hospital beds. In terms of possible motive, we did find a striking write-up in a bunch of FBI faxes

from 1992. It's by a doctor working with the FBI Kansas City office. After reviewing the patient's medical records, he'd then written up a profile of a hypothetical suspect. To be clear, the doctor was not referring to any specific individual. Here's fellow reporter Shoko reading part of it. Shoko- The subject is a strong, self-reliant, take-charge person who has no trouble making Here's fellow reporter Shokal reading part of it. he will see himself as smarter and more decisive than anyone around him. In patients he has selected to help out in death, he will always be the first on the scene,

thus ensuring the best hospital care and the least suffering in the final moments. FBI agents still didn't have the answers they wanted from the living, but they were hoping to find answers from the dead. That's what led them to dig up 13 bodies and cemeteries across the state of Missouri. There are two things we still haven't mentioned about that. The first is that when reporter Rudy Keller staked out the open grave, he decided to bring his girlfriend with him. I was in the car with my girlfriend at the time and she was like, well, what are we doing? And I said, well, let's go out to the cemetery.

Every once in a day to journalists, we have the best date ideas. Who wouldn't want to sit in a cold car in a graveyard waiting for a body to be returned to the ground? The second thing is that after the FBI exhumed those bodies, the Bureau allegedly gave one family the wrong date for when their loved one would be reburied. Here's Cynthia Owens, whose mother was among the veterans who died at the hospital.

So, my mom was buried on a family plot. They told us the date they was going to exhumed her so that we could be there if we wanted to. They surprisingly did it the day before. Did it the day before because they said immediate stuff, which we didn't wasn't able to go. Of course, you know, they already did it. That, oh, that really made me mad. That was really inconsiderate and things like that made the families distrustful of the FBI investigation. The reason the FBI went to this extreme step of digging up the bodies was that they needed hard evidence of foul play.

A toxicology report could determine the cause of death. And if there was foul play, they'd be closer to making their case. The medical examiner doing autopsies wasn't my dad. The VA and the FBI brought in their own medical examiner, a forensic pathologist. And so they then had hired Dr. Botten to come in and investigate. Dr. Michael Botten is a big name in the world of forensic science. He was the chief medical examiner for New York City for a bit. He had a TV show on HBO called Autopsy. He also went to work on a ton of famous cases, including the murder of George Floyd. It seemed like the FBI had all their ducks in a row.

Even my dad was impressed. They took soil around the bodies to see if there were poisonous stuff in there. They did an incredibly thorough job. He probably got paid a lot of money. At this point, the FBI had conducted over 200 interviews. They had torn open the graves of 13 veterans. And early statements by medical investigators working with the Bureau concluded that the deaths in question at the VA were not natural deaths. This was it. They were very close to having the final piece of evidence that the FBI needed so it could

conclude the investigation and bring justice to the families. They were supposed to send all the blood work and samples out for analysis, get the results and move forward. The clock was ticking. And then months went by and we never heard anything from the report. Months turned into years. At the two-year mark, dad grew tired of waiting. He told me he gave Dr. Baden a call. He said, aren't you gonna ask me the $64,000 question? So he was in that era. Now, you know what the $64,000 is? I know what the $64,000 is.

So he said, what is the $64,000? He said, well, what are the toxicology shows? He said, well, we haven't run it. I said, and why would that be? He said, because we're too busy doing the Texas thing. The Waco thing. The Waco, we don't have time to do that. It's like, are you kidding?

So he said, we haven't done it. Texas thing. The Waco thing. The Waco. We don't have time to do that. It's like, are you kidding? So he said, we haven't done it. Now, I followed up with Dr. Botten on the phone to ask him if he remembered that call. It was 30 years ago, and he says he doesn't remember talking to my dad. That being said, FBI documents show that they did blame some of the hangups on the Waco disaster and the World Trade Center bombing, and later later even the O.J. Simpson case. The bottom line was their priorities seemed to lie elsewhere, anywhere but the VA case. Everyone needed the lab test to come back for the case to move forward. Everyone wanted some sort of update from the FBI or the VA, but all they got was

wanted some sort of update from the FBI or the VA, but all they got was silence. It was like the investigation just ground to a halt. Looking for a path to accelerate your career? Clear direction for next level success? In a place that is innovative and practical? A path to stay current and connected to industry? A place where you can be yourself? You will find it at York University School of Continuing Studies, where we offer career programs purpose-built for you. Visit continue.yorku.ca. It's a new day. How can you make the most of it with your membership rewards points?

Earn points on everyday purchases. Use them for that long-awaited vacation. You can earn points almost anywhere, and they never expire. Treat your friends or spoil your family. Earn them on your adventure and use them how you want, when you want. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Learn more at mx.ca slash ymx terms apply. So after 200 interviews, 13 bodies, and reports signed off by a big shot medical examiner, the FBI did not put the case forward. Instead they pulled up stakes, moved out of the hospital, and did pretty much nothing.

They didn't close the case. They just let it fester and gather dust while the statute of limitations kept ticking. Ken Jacob was a Missouri state legislator who originally contacted the FBI after two anonymous hospital workers came to him in distress. And he told us of a very strange phone call he got early on in the investigation. It was a call suggesting that the FBI was under pressure to bury their findings. Here's Ken. I think one of the strangest events of the whole experience was,

I don't remember if it was Williams or the other FBI agent, but one of them called me at home early in the morning and said that they were being taken off the investigation. I've never been a special agent, a GS 1811, but I know a lot of people who have been, some who still are. Let me assure you, they don't call politicians at their home, in the morning or at night, and ask for a case to be continued. Please, please, don't let them shut down our case. That's a line you'd expect to hear on the X-Files, not from a real FBI agent, in real

life. Anyway, the agent wanted Ken to call someone close to the governor, Republican John Ashcroft. Someone who could keep the agent and the agency on the case. Ken made the call. I felt like it was my responsibility to call him and say, hey man, I got this call from the FBI and they want their being removed from this case. I don't really think he knew the story that well. And I kind of said, here's what they think happened.

The deaths were never correlated to the illness that the patients had. The governor's colleague on the other end of the phone struck Ken as being oddly quiet, aloof. He just heard me out and said thank you, you know, and I don't remember it being a positive conversation. Here's another very strange component of the investigation. Despite the 200-plus interviews, the FBI did not speak to Nurse Manager Lee Miller, who was on the original board of inquiry and who knew Richard Williams. I thought that was odd, and so did Lee. If the FBI had done their job right and done it quickly, that would have been a tremendous

relief for everyone at the hospital. Nurse Lee Miller and Dr. Jan Swaney were waiting for answers. Dad kept hoping for news too. But the most anxious was Gordon Christensen. His data was being questioned, and the VA seemed to have decided early on that he was a whistleblower, a troublemaker, and not a team player. He was already in a lot of trouble with the higher-ups of the VA. Even when the FBI was still on the scene, the VA seemed determined to shut him up.

And if they couldn't do that, to discredit him completely. In early September of 1992, Gordon was given notice that a carefully selected panel of VA officials wanted to talk to him. The panel's purpose was to talk about his data. They wanted to hear him out and get to the bottom of things. They promised they would fly him out to meet the panel soon. Well, when it came time to fly someplace, it didn't happen. They said, never mind. We're coming to Columbia and we'll talk to you there instead. And this star-studded panel of people who were supposedly coming to the VA to talk to Gordon,

they arrived on October 1st and proceeded to talk to pretty much everyone except Gordon. At first, they refused to even see him. But Gordon insisted on talking to them. He threatened to go public if they didn't at least hear him out He could not believe their reaction. I was told I was a foolish young man for doing this and that Even when I explained what was going on, I was told that I was a foolish young man Gordon went to my dad and told him that the officials had called him and all his efforts

foolish. It was a turning point for my father. And it was at that moment that I realized there was a huge cover-up going on and nobody really wanted to find out what was happening because they all understood the statistics and they all decided to cover it up. According to Gordon's notes from this time, the panel members also told him he was too outspoken and should not have pressed the issue. And then in the morning that they were supposed to be there to talk to me, the VA releases

a statement publicly without talking to me or anybody saying that my research was terrible, was flawed. And this is nationally, this was a press release, which of course effectively ended my career as a scientist. I mean, it was over. I can only conclude that the VA had set him up to take the fall. They pulled the rug out from under him, and the consequences for his career would be severe. Gordon was certainly attacked professionally and there were times when he was worried he'd be attacked personally. Gordon's wife Alice remembers

how he became increasingly isolated through this period. The administration had essentially cut him off for trying to stop a potential serial killer and he didn't even know if anything was being done about it. Certainly, from my perspective, we had limited information. No one was coming to us to explain. It was like an absence of information, which left us more puzzled and angry and frightened. Up until this point, Gordon had been trying to work within the chain of command. But in February of 1993, he made a huge move. He filed a complaint with the VA Office of Inspector General.

He accused the VA of trying to cover up patient deaths. Now he was a whistleblower. Gordon's complaint was ignored for two years, but his name, which was supposed to be confidential, was leaked all over the place by the Office of the Inspector General. And thus the VA was planning reprisals. He may not have known exactly what was going on, but he must have sensed it. There's this one incident in particular that Dr. Jan Swainey told us about that really shows how bad things had gotten for Gordon.

I got a call from Gordon one night at home, and Gordon said, Jan, I have something I'd like to talk with you about. Could I come over? And I said, of course, sure. Gordon seemed a little different that night. He seemed nervous, and I'd never seen him like that before. But what he had to say was that his phone was being tapped, he was being followed, and he wasn't sure what was going to happen to him. He was concerned enough that he had decided to make copies of all his documents, all his

materials he'd assembled investigating these cases at the VA. And he was going to give a copy to each of three people in case he were to disappear. He didn't want his evidence to disappear. Disappear? That's the kind of thing someone would say if they were being chased by the Soviet secret police or owed the mafia money. We asked Jan if he said anything else

that could explain why Gordon was so fearful, but at the time, Jan was also a little freaked out. I can't elaborate on how he came to conclude that his phone was tapped and that he was being followed. And I may not have questioned him closely, perhaps because I did not want to know more. But I do know he said, I wanted to come over here. I wanted to call you from my home phone. I wanted to come over here at night because I'm being followed.

She hid the documents away. Where were you storing it? In my bathroom vanity down, you know, like under the bathroom sink way down there. I didn't have a safe, you know. While the situation may have seemed a little absurd, she took Gordon very seriously. And there was a good chance that he was being followed or chased by the VA. They seemed to be building a case to get him prosecuted for leaking confidential records. I have always felt like Gordon was such a rational,

smart, clever person that I had no reason to question him at that point. I believed him. I am sorry that a man of his integrity got drawn into something like this, but I do believe that Gordon Christensen was always trying to do the right thing. Despite all of Gordon's efforts, Richard Williams was still a free man. In fact, he was still a practicing nurse. In the end, the VA decided that they couldn't keep him around anymore.

But they didn't just cut him loose. According to the Riverfront Times, the weekly St. Louis newspaper, the hospital director wrote him a letter of recommendation. And Richard Williams, alleged killer who had torn a hospital apart, found a nice job caring for another extremely vulnerable population. The residence of a nursing home, a short drive away. Next time on Witnessed Night Shift. I recognize what a horrible thing it was

to put him in charge of a population of the most vulnerable people there are. Not that we just gave them negligent care, we gave them death sentences in our facility. The statistical evidence was incredible. There was no explanation that was given by anybody how there could be such a discrepancy during that time period that this nurse had become the supervisor of that ward.

I sat there and I thought, oh my God, these people sitting right behind me and I have just lost this case. Oh my God. Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to. Oh my god! 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. Witnessed, Night Shift, is a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment. The show was hosted by Jake Edelstein. It was written and reported by Jake Edelstein and me, Shoko Planbek. Amy Planbek is 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. David Eichler, Lane Gerbig, Erica Wong, David McMahon, and Mark McAdam provided voice talent for this episode. A special thanks to Eddie Adelstein and Benny Adelstein. 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.

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