Killer Nurse by John Foxjohn Page B

stations, and with abundantly available measuring cups. It didn’t make any sense to try to use a syringe.
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    The next morning, Tuesday, April 29, Sergeant Abbott and Corporal Shurley received a call from an unexpected source, an attorney by the name of Robert Flournoy, who at that time was also the attorney for the City of Lufkin. He had a client in his office who wanted to talk to them.
    The client’s name raised some eyebrows with the detectives. It was Mark Kevin Saenz, Kimberly Clark Saenz’s husband.
    Corporal Shurley left the police department and went to the attorney’s office, where he met Kevin, who told Corporal Shurley that he was in the process of filing for a divorce. The reason he’d called the meeting was to inform the police that he’d seen some Internet searches on Kim’s computer that had disturbed him. Kevin told the detectives that he had found records of searches done on bleach poisoning. He also told Corporal Shurley that he didn’t want to see Kim get into trouble for something that she didn’t do, and Shurley assured him if his wife hadn’t done anything wrong, she wouldn’t get into trouble. The detectives said that Saenz continued to completely cooperate with police after the initial interview, until he began to see all the evidence piling up against her, and then he refused to cooperate anymore.
    After Corporal Shurley returned to the station, the two detectives made arrangements to speak with the two eyewitnesses. The first one was Ms. Hall, the sixty-four-year-old mother of three who had worked at Memorial Hospital as a nurse’s assistant for seven and a half years prior to becoming ill. She told them that she always took a book to read and sat in the same place, a corner seat in Bay B with a machine between her and Ms. Hamilton. On April 28, LVN Kim Saenz was the nurse for both Ms. Hall and Ms. Hamilton. Ms. Hall told the detectives that Saenz was always a nice person. They laughed and talked together, and they’d even discussed the Lord that day.
    What caught her attention and made her stop reading was the way Saenz was acting. “She was fidgety—not acting like herself,” Ms. Hall recalled. She watched as Saenz went to the drawer of the desk at the nurses’ station and took out some syringes and dropped some paper in the trash. Saenz glanced all around as if she was checking to see if anyone was observing her, then set the bleach pail on the floor. Before squatting next to it, Kim again looked around as if making sure that no one was watching her.
    Ms. Hall told them that Kim then stuck the syringe in the bleach water and drew some of it up. She stood at the station a minute looking around and then walked to Ms. Marva Rhone’s station and injected the bleach into her saline port. Just as Ms. Hall was wondering if she was really seeing what she thought she saw, Ms. Hamilton became very upset. She heard Ms. Hamilton say she saw something, and Ms. Hall responded, “Lord, I did, too.”
    Ms. Hall told the detectives that she begged the nurses not to let Kim touch her.
    Ms. Hamilton’s statement was similar to Ms. Hall’s. There were some minor variations because they were sitting in different places, at different distances, and had different angles. Ms. Hamilton echoed Ms. Hall’s description of Kim’s unusual behavior. This was what had originally captured the attention of both of them.
    When Kim put the pail on the floor, Ms. Hamilton said to herself, “What is she doing?” Ms. Hall had been a dialysis patient for a year, but Ms. Hamilton had been one for eight years. She was by far more experienced than Ms. Hall, and she knew they never put anything on the floor.
    In a deposition later, Ms. Hamilton related how she saw Kim pour the bleach from a Clorox bottle and she’d smelled the bleach. Both witnesses had seen her inject the bleach not only into Ms. Rhone’s lines, but