Orville Lynn Majors

Majors was born in Greenville, Kentucky in 1961. He took care of his elderly grandmother as a teen, and the experience led him to go into nursing.[3] He graduated from Nashville Memorial School of Practical Nursing in 1989, and took a job at Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, north of Terre Haute. He briefly took a higher-paying job in Tennessee, but returned to VCH in 1993.[4]

Majors was one of the most popular nurses at VCH, especially among elderly patients. He received glowing evaluations.[3]

However, suspicion developed when the death rate at VCH jumped significantly after Majors returned to Indiana. In the year before his return to VCH, an average of around 26 patients died annually at the 56-bed hospital and four-bed intensive care unit.[5] After Majors started working at the facility, however, this rate skyrocketed to more than 100 per year, with nearly one out of every three patients admitted to the hospital dying.[6]

The circumstances of the deaths also raised eyebrows, even though most of them were elderly. Some died from an erratic heartbeat following respiratory arrest, a reverse of the normal pattern. Others died from conditions they didn't have when they were admitted or took a sharp downturn despite being otherwise healthy.[3] At the same time, patients began coding at an alarming rate.[7]

Eventually, Majors' coworkers began noticing a correlation between the spike in deaths and when Majors was on duty, joking about when the next patient would die. However, in 1995, nursing supervisor Dawn Stirek was concerned enough to check the time cards to see who was on duty at the time of the deaths. She discovered that Majors was on duty for 130 of 147 deaths between 1993 and 1995.[3] Alarmed, she alerted hospital officials, who called in the Indiana State Police. Majors was suspended pending investigation.[7] The Indiana State Nursing Board suspended Majors' license for five years after it determined he had exceeded his authority by giving emergency drugs and working in an ICU without a doctor, and VCH fired him.[3][7]

Investigators subsequently determined that when Majors was on duty, there was an average of one death every 23 hours, or almost one death per day–a pattern that held when he worked on weekdays or weekends. When he was off duty, the death rate dropped to one every 23 days.[8] They also determined that a patient at VCH was 42 times more likely to die when Majors was on duty.[9]

Majors adamantly denied wrongdoing. While running a pet store in his hometown of Linton, he hired a lawyer and made the rounds of talk shows to proclaim his innocence.[3] Prosecutors and the state police were hamstrung at first; while they believed from the beginning that Majors was a killer, they couldn't prove how he did it. However, after Majors began his public relations offensive, several relatives of patients who died at VCH called the state police to report suspicious behavior on Majors' part before their loved ones died. They recalled that their loved ones either coded or died within minutes of Majors giving them injections, in some cases before he left the room.[7]

The state police medical team noticed several patients' heart patterns widening around the time Majors was on duty. They called in electrophysiologist Erik Prystowsky to look at the EKGs. He suspected that there were only three explanations for these patterns–a potassium overdose, a sudden heart attack, or a large clot in the lung. With this in mind, in September 1995, state officials began exhuming 15 patients who had been witnessed getting injections and had widening heart patterns around the time they died. None of the bodies had signs of a heart attack or clotting in the lung, which proved they had been murdered. After a former roommate recalled seeing potassium chloride and epinephrine vials in their house, police obtained a search warrant and discovered numerous vials that could be traced back to the hospital.[3][7]

After a two-year investigation, Majors was arrested in December 1997 and charged with seven murders. As mentioned above, investigators believed he killed 100 to 130 people. However, prosecutors chose to focus on just seven to keep from overwhelming the jury.[7] A total of 79 witnesses were called to the stand at his trial in 1999. Some of the witnesses testified that he hated elderly people, and that he believed that they "should be gassed."[10]

Majors was convicted on October 17 for six murders; the jury deadlocked on a seventh because the victim took longer to die than the others.[7] He was sentenced to six consecutive terms of 60 years, the maximum possible penalty under Indiana law at the time, virtually assuring that he would die in prison. Presiding judge Ernest Yelton described Majors' crimes as "diabolical acts" and "a parallel of evil at its most wicked," and concluded that "the maximum sentence is the minimum sentence in this case."[10]

VCH, which had been renamed West Central Community Hospital after ousting Majors, was slapped with wrongful-death suits by the families of 80 patients who died at Majors' hands. Most of them settled the suits and were compensated by a state patients' fund.[11] The hospital was subsequently fined $80,000 for negligence and code violations, and was briefly forced to shut down after losing its accreditation. By 2009, it had been taken over by Terre Haute-based Union Hospital and renamed Union Hospital Clinton.[7][3]

Majors appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court, which let the verdict stand in 2002.[12] He served his sentence at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, where he died of heart failure on September 24, 2017 while arguing with correctional staff, Officer R. Houston.[3]

The story of the police investigation and prosecution of Majors is featured in a segment of an episode of The New Detectives entitled "Broken Trust" (Season 9, Episode 11).

The story was also covered in an episode of Oxygen's License To Kill, entitled "Lethal Injections."

Majors' crimes were also disussed at length in the Infamous Murders episode "Angels of Death".

• List of serial killers in the United States
• List of serial killers by number of victims