Respiratory therapist Jennifer Hall confesses to three murders

Respiratory therapist Jennifer Hall was hired at Hedrick Medical Center in Chillicothe, Missouri, in December 2001. But just two months later, a series of deaths and medical emergencies occurred among otherwise healthy patients.

“Who is perpetuating these poisonings?” Livingston County Prosecutor Adam Warren said of the emergencies on Accident, suicide or murder, Airs Saturdays at 8/7c on Oxygen. “Are they accidental? Are they intentional?”

Despite the suspicions surrounding her, Hall evaded arrest and prosecution for twenty years. That changed when a police detective reopened the case and brought it to the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Division.

“What they said just shocked me,” said Lt. Brian Schmidt, a retired police officer from Chillicothe, on Accident, suicide or murder. “She said, ‘This is not as unusual as people think. This happens a lot. There are a lot of medical serial killers.'”

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The deaths of Fern Franco and Coval Gann are being investigated

Fern Franco, 75, was admitted to Hedrick Medical Center on May 17, 2002, for pneumonia. The next day, she was found in cardiac arrest by respiratory therapist Jennifer Hall. Hall alerted a nurse, who called a “Code Blue,” meaning Franco needed immediate resuscitation due to respiratory or cardiac arrest. Despite the best efforts of doctors and nurses, Franco died. Her cause of death was determined to be natural, and she was embalmed and buried.

“Then, on the 21st^st“I got a hint from some nurses at the hospital that she might not have died of natural causes, and I was stunned,” said Scott Lindley, a former Livingston County coroner and funeral director, on Accident, suicide or murder.

Dr. Cal Greenlaw, an internist, suspected something was wrong at the hospital months before Franco’s death.

“He said, ‘Someone is dosing my patients,'” Lindley said. “He thought someone was giving them something that would poison the patient while they were in the hospital.”

In testimony, Dr. Greenlaw described how a woman went into cardiac arrest and had to have her heart restarted because her blood sugar was dangerously low.

“I didn’t see any point in why she would give a blood sugar reading. She wasn’t that sick. She had a mild bout of pneumonia. She was quite young,” Dr. Greenlaw said in his testimony. “I talked to the nurses about how something very serious is wrong here – why this person gave a blood sugar reading and needs to continue to give blood sugar readings.”

Dr. Greenlaw considered that the patient had been given a large amount of insulin even though he was not diabetic and there was no medical reason for administering the medication.

Coval Gann was another patient who died under mysterious circumstances after being admitted for dehydration, just two months before Franco’s death. The cause of death was given as a heart attack.

“82 years old. His health was rather weak,” said David Gann, Coval’s son, on Accident, suicide or murder“I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is just happening.'”

The assumption that drugs such as insulin were intentionally used to poison patients was difficult to prove.

“When you do an autopsy on someone, you don’t see anything,” Lindley said. “Because the drug evaporates so quickly after death that it’s difficult to find.”

Autopsy reveals new details

When Lindley began going through the medical records of all the patients who had suffered cardiac arrest in the past few months, he came across a common denominator: Jennifer Hall.

“She was the one who found the code, started the code and finished the code,” he said.

When suspicion fell on Hall, the hospital issued a rule that she was not allowed to be in a patient’s room without another person present. She was fired after Franco’s death for violating this rule.

Hall also had a troubled criminal past. Police learned that she had set fire to her school when she was in eighth grade. She was also tried and found guilty of arson at the hospital where she was previously employed. While awaiting sentencing, she was hired by Hedrick Medical Center, which said it had no knowledge of her criminal past. After working at Hedrick Medical Center, she served just one year in prison before later being acquitted of arson charges.

In the meantime, Lindley has become aware of a drug that is often used alongside insulin to treat patients: succinylcholine. If the wrong dosage is used, it can lead to injury and death.

“Succinylcholine is a paralyzing agent used when intubating patients,” Warren said. “When they put the tube down your throat to help you breathe, you often gag or cough. That’s why succinylcholine is used to paralyze your throat.”

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Realizing that embalming Franco so soon after her death may have resulted in the drugs administered to her remaining in her tissues, Lindley requested an autopsy.

“We wanted to find out how Fern Franco died. I didn’t want to give up until I got that done,” he said.

He sent Franco’s samples to a laboratory in Philadelphia to test for succinylcholine. In 2004, he received confirmation that traces of the drug were found in Franco’s kidney. The narcotic morphine was also detected in her system.

“She should spend the rest of her life in prison,” he said. “She’s a serial murder case. But it’s better than nothing. I just wish it had happened when my mother was alive so she could have had some closure, too.”

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