The Crimes of Genene Jones
Genene Jones stands as one of America’s most notorious serial killers, a pediatric nurse suspected of murdering up to 60 infants and children under her care during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Born July 13, 1950, Jones worked as a licensed vocational nurse (LVN) at Bexar County Hospital (now University Hospital of San Antonio) in the pediatric intensive care unit, where she methodically ended young lives by injecting them with lethal doses of drugs including digoxin, heparin, and succinylcholine.
During her tenure at the hospital from the late 1970s through March 1982, a statistically improbable number of children died under Jones’ care during what staff grimly dubbed “the death shift”—the 3-11 p.m. hours when Jones typically worked. Rather than conduct a thorough investigation, hospital officials chose to ask all LVNs to resign and staff the unit exclusively with registered nurses, fearing litigation. No criminal investigation was pursued at that time, and hospital records of Jones’ activities were allegedly misplaced and then destroyed.
The Kerrville Clinic and Final Crimes
After leaving the San Antonio hospital, Jones took a position at a pediatric clinic in Kerrville, Texas, approximately 60 miles northwest of San Antonio. Working alongside Dr. Kathleen Holland, Jones continued her pattern of inducing medical emergencies in the children under her care, often “heroically” attempting to save them afterward.
The pattern became undeniable at the Kerrville clinic. During a brief period in 1982, five infants who received intravenous injections prepared by Jones stopped breathing—four survived, but one did not. Dr. Holland discovered two puncture marks in a bottle of succinylcholine in the drug storage area accessible only to her and Jones. This discovery finally triggered the criminal investigation that had been avoided in San Antonio.
The Victims: Children Whose Lives Were Stolen
The known and suspected victims of Genene Jones represent a heartbreaking toll of innocent lives:
Chelsea Ann McClellan (15 months old) – Chelsea died on September 17, 1982, after Jones injected her with a lethal dose of succinylcholine during what should have been a routine clinic visit. Her mother, Petti McClellan, was holding Chelsea in her arms when Jones administered the injections. Chelsea’s mother described how her daughter became “limp, like a rag doll” and couldn’t breathe. Chelsea “was trying to say my name, but she couldn’t,” her mother recalled. Jones was convicted of Chelsea’s murder in 1984 and sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Joshua Earl Sawyer (11 months old) – Joshua died on December 12, 1981, after Jones injected him with a massive overdose of Dilantin (phenytoin), an anti-seizure drug, while he was a patient in the pediatric ICU at Bexar County Hospital. His mother, Connie Weeks, kept his medical chart for three decades, evidence that would later help prosecutors. In January 2020, Jones pleaded guilty to Joshua’s murder and received a life sentence.
Rolando Santos (4 weeks old) – In January 1982, baby Rolando was injected with an overdose of heparin, a powerful anticoagulant, causing him to bleed profusely. Dr. Larry Hooghuis testified that Jones had mixed up a heparin injection, making it 300 times more powerful than it should have been. Miraculously, Rolando survived. Jones was convicted of injury to a child and sentenced to 60 years concurrently with her murder sentence.
Richard “Ricky” Nelson (8 months old) – Ricky died on July 3, 1981, at Bexar County Hospital. Jones was indicted for his murder in June 2017, as prosecutors worked to keep her behind bars ahead of her scheduled 2018 release.
Rosemary Vega (2 years old) – Rosemary died on September 16, 1981. She had been taken to the pediatric ICU to recover from surgery when, under Jones’ care during the 3-11 p.m. shift, she began experiencing breathing problems and suffered seizures. A surgery resident noticed that the breathing machine had been altered by an unknown source, feeding her too little oxygen. Jones was indicted for Rosemary’s murder in June 2017.
Patrick Zavala (4 months old) – Patrick died on January 17, 1982, at Bexar County Hospital from drug overdoses administered by Jones. He was indicted posthumously in June 2017.
Paul Edward Villarreal (3 months old) – Paul was born with a deformed skull and had undergone surgery to correct it. On September 24, 1981, his mother was told everything was fine and he would be going home. Hours later, she received a call that her son was dead. Paul’s sister Luna said her mother “knew that my brother didn’t just die, she knew that something had happened to him.” Prosecutors alleged that Jones injected baby Paul with a powerful drug that killed him. Jones was indicted for Paul’s murder in October 2017.
Additional Suspected Victims
The investigation revealed disturbing patterns involving many other children. Jose Flores, an infant boy, went into seizures and began bleeding badly under Jones’ care at Bexar County Hospital. After he recovered, the same crisis occurred again the following day during “the death shift.” His heart stopped, and the cause of death was listed as unknown. Blood testing later revealed an overdose of heparin—a drug no one had ordered for him.
Albert Garza, a three-month-old boy, was found by resident physicians to have been given an overdose of heparin by Jones. When doctors confronted her, she became angry and left, but the child recovered.
Prosecutors and investigators believe these cases represent only a fraction of Jones’ victims. Ron Sutton, the criminal prosecutor who won the original murder conviction, estimates Jones is responsible for between 11 and 46 infant deaths during her time at Bexar County Hospital alone.
Justice Delayed and Nearly Denied
In 1984, Jones was convicted of murdering Chelsea McClellan and sentenced to 99 years in prison. She received an additional 60-year concurrent sentence for injuring Rolando Santos. However, due to a mandatory release law in effect at the time of her conviction—designed to reduce prison overcrowding—Jones was scheduled for release in March 2018 after serving only one-third of her sentence.
This prospect horrified victims’ families and prosecutors. In 2017, then-Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood launched a secret investigation into the coldest cases to bring new charges. Between May and October 2017, grand juries indicted Jones on five additional murder charges: Joshua Sawyer, Richard Nelson, Rosemary Vega, Patrick Zavala, and Paul Villarreal.
These new indictments prevented Jones’ release. On January 16, 2020, now 69 years old and using a walker, Jones unexpectedly changed her plea and admitted guilt to murdering Joshua Sawyer. In exchange for her guilty plea to one count, prosecutors dropped the remaining four murder charges. She was sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole in 20 years—meaning she would be 87 years old before having another chance at freedom.
District Judge Frank J. Castro told Jones during sentencing: “You took God’s most precious gift, babies. Defenseless, innocent babies. I’m going to follow this agreement here that you agreed to with your attorney and the state. But I truly believe that your ultimate judgment is in the next life.”
Prosecutor Catherine Babbitt stated: “With this plea, the odds are she will take her last breath in prison.”
A Confession Decades Later
For over three decades, Jones maintained her innocence. But in a 2011 letter to the Texas Board of Nursing, Jones wrote: “I look back now on what I did and agree with you now that it was heinous, that I was heinous.” She attempted to excuse her actions by claiming she “was not of sound mind then or any time before 1994” and that she found religion in prison. Prosecutors also revealed that Jones admitted to killing multiple babies during an interview for parole review and confessed to a fellow inmate about her crimes.
The Cover-Up That Enabled Murder
Perhaps most disturbing is the institutional failure that allowed Jones to continue killing. When the suspicious death rate at Bexar County Hospital’s pediatric ICU became undeniable, hospital administrators—including a future mayor of San Antonio who served as board chairman—convinced themselves the problem was not rooted in the work of a single sociopathic nurse. Unable to explain the deaths and fearing expensive litigation, they simply replaced all LVNs with registered nurses, thus removing Jones without singling her out for termination.
This cynical scheme enabled Jones to obtain employment at the Kerrville clinic where she murdered Chelsea McClellan and injured other children. No attempt was made to contact legal authorities or warn the families whose babies had died. The exact number of Jones’ victims will never be known because hospital officials destroyed the records.
Why Did She Do It?
Prosecutors theorized that Jones killed children to demonstrate the need for a pediatric intensive care unit at a nearby hospital or to appear as a miracle worker who could save dying children. Peter Elkind, who wrote The Death Shift: Nurse Genene Jones and the Texas Baby Murders, described how Jones seemed to take “some sort of perverse thrill from the baby’s final moments.” Her behavior after baby Jose Flores died was particularly bizarre—she grabbed the dead baby and ran down the hospital corridor while family members chased after her, finally losing them when she went into the morgue.
Jones’ actions were likened to firefighters turned arsonists who set fires so they can be heroes battling blazes they themselves started.
A Tale of Two Realities: When Ending Children’s Lives Becomes “Healthcare”
The Numbers
Genene Jones is suspected of killing up to 60 children over approximately four years of her nursing career. She was convicted of two murders, sentenced to life in prison, and will almost certainly die behind bars. District Attorney LaHood called her “pure evil” and stated that “justice warrants that she be held accountable for the crimes she committed.”
Now consider the numbers from the abortion industry in America:
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 625,978 reported abortions in 2021, though the Guttmacher Institute estimates higher numbers—930,160 in 2020. By 2024, the monthly average reached 95,200 abortions, or approximately 1.14 million annually.
Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, performed a record 402,230 abortions in 2022-2023—accounting for roughly 40% of all abortions in the United States. This means Planned Parenthood alone ended 1,075 lives every day, 44 every hour.
What One Abortion Provider Accomplishes
Research shows that approximately 14% of obstetrician-gynecologists perform abortions, and clinics perform 96% of all abortions in the United States. A physician working full-time at an abortion clinic, performing a conservative estimate of 10-15 procedures per day, five days per week, would conduct between 2,400 and 3,600 abortions annually.
Over a 30-year career, such a physician would perform between 72,000 and 108,000 abortions—between 1,200 and 1,800 times the number of children Genene Jones is suspected of killing.
Even a part-time abortion provider performing just 1,000 procedures per year would surpass Jones’ suspected total of 60 deaths in less than one month. Over a 30-year career, that same part-time provider would perform 30,000 abortions—500 times more than Jones’ suspected victim count.
The Moral Paradox
Here we confront a profound inconsistency in American society. Genene Jones is rightfully condemned as a monster, “pure evil” who will spend her final days behind bars for ending the lives of up to 60 children. Society demands accountability. Prosecutors spent years building cases. Judges declared she had taken “God’s most precious gift.” Victims’ families wept in courtrooms, displaying photographs of the babies stolen from them.
Yet physicians who end exponentially more children’s lives through abortion are not prosecuted—they are protected, celebrated, and funded. Planned Parenthood reported nearly $2.1 billion in income, with $792.2 million (39%) coming from taxpayers. Abortion providers are hailed as healthcare heroes, champions of women’s rights, and courageous defenders of bodily autonomy.
The critical question becomes: What is the moral difference?
The Question of Personhood
The answer provided by abortion advocates centers on personhood and developmental stage. They argue that the unborn are not yet “persons” deserving of legal protection, that human life does not truly begin until some later developmental milestone—quickening, viability, birth, or even beyond.
But from a pro-life perspective—shared by millions of Americans—human life begins at conception when sperm fertilizes egg, creating a new, genetically distinct human organism. This view holds that the difference between an adult and a zygote is one of degree of development, not of kind. As one writer noted: “The difference between the individual in its adult stage and in its zygotic stage is one of form, not nature.”
If one accepts that life begins at conception—that the unborn child is a human being with inherent dignity and rights—then abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human life. By definition, that is homicide.
Two Standards, One Society
Why is the intentional killing of Chelsea McClellan at 15 months old treated as heinous murder deserving life imprisonment, while the intentional killing of an unborn child at 15 weeks—or even full-term in some jurisdictions—is considered not only legal but a fundamental right to be celebrated?
The location of the child provides the only consistent distinction: Jones killed children who had been born, while abortion providers kill children who have not yet been born. But can location truly be the defining characteristic of personhood? Does passing through the birth canal magically transform a non-person into a person?
Consider that in various states, when a pregnant woman is murdered, the perpetrator can face two counts of homicide, legally acknowledging that killing an unborn child constitutes murder. Yet in those same states, the mother may legally choose to abort that same child.
The Cultural Divide
This paradox reflects the deepest moral divide in contemporary American society. One side sees abortion as:
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A woman’s fundamental right to bodily autonomy
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Essential healthcare
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A necessary option for women facing difficult circumstances
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A private medical decision
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Progress toward gender equality
The other side sees abortion as:
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The destruction of society’s most vulnerable members
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An intrinsic evil that is always wrong, regardless of circumstances
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A moral catastrophe of historic proportions
The Scale of the Tragedy
If the pro-life position is correct—that the unborn are persons with the same right to life as born children—then America has not just tolerated but actively promoted and funded a holocaust. Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, tens of millions of abortions have been performed in the United States. Each one would represent a life taken, a child killed.
By this accounting, abortion providers are responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths than the most prolific serial killers in history. Yet half of America not only refuses to acknowledge this as wrong but actively celebrates abortion as liberation, empowerment, and social progress. Abortion rights demonstrations draw thousands who chant slogans treating abortion as a positive good.
An Uncomfortable Truth
For those who believe life begins at conception, watching society treat Genene Jones as a monster while simultaneously subsidizing and celebrating abortion providers creates profound cognitive dissonance. How can a nation condemn one person to life in prison for killing 60 children while taxpayer dollars fund organizations that perform hundreds of thousands of abortions annually?
The uncomfortable answer depends on one’s answer to the fundamental question: When does a human being acquire the right to life?
If that right begins at conception, then abortion is indeed murder—medically sanitized, legally protected, and culturally celebrated murder, but murder nonetheless. The only difference between Genene Jones and an abortion provider, from this perspective, is that society has granted one legal permission to do what it rightly condemns the other for doing.
If that right begins at birth (or some point in between), then abortion is fundamentally different from Jones’ crimes, and the comparison is morally offensive.
This is not a puzzle that can be solved by compromise or nuance. Either the unborn have the same right to life as born children, or they do not. Either abortion is the killing of persons, or it is not. The middle ground that American society has tried to occupy—treating unborn children as simultaneously worthy of legal protection in some contexts (fetal homicide laws) while denying them that protection in others (abortion)—is intellectually incoherent.
The Question That Remains
Why is one a tragedy deserving a life sentence and the other celebrated by half of America?
The answer reveals the fault line running through the soul of our nation. We cannot agree on who counts as human. We cannot agree on who deserves to live. And until we reckon honestly with the question of when human life begins and what obligations we owe to the smallest and most vulnerable among us, this moral paradox will continue to define and divide us.
Genene Jones will die in prison for killing children. Meanwhile, abortion providers who end exponentially more lives will retire comfortably, perhaps even honored for their service. Whether that represents justice or moral blindness depends entirely on one question: Were the children Genene Jones killed fundamentally different from the children abortion providers kill every day?
The victims cannot speak for themselves. Only we can decide if their lives—all of their lives—mattered.