A Bexar County Grand Jury today presented a second indictment against killer nurse Genene Jones, charging her with placing an unknown substance into the IV feeding tube of a two year old girl who was undergoing routine treatment at what was then called Bexar County Hospital, now University Hospital, back in September of 1981, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
It is the second Bexar County child murder charge brought against the nurse known as the 'Angel of Death.' The death of Rosemary Vega happened three months before 11 month old Joshua Sawyer died at the same hospital. Jones was indicted for that crime last month. The grand jury heard testimony from Rosemary's mother during the same session at which Joshua Sawyer was indicted.
Jones, 66, is suspected of killing as many as sixty children during the time she worked as a pediatric nurse in San Antonio, and at a doctor's clinic in Kerrville.
She is currently serving a sentence that was handed down in 1985 for the murder of a girl in Kerrville, but under 'prison overcrowding' rules in place at the time of that conviction, Jones has a 'mandatory' release date of March 1, 2018.
District Attorney Nico LaHood said his goal with these additional charges is to make sure Jones never walks free. A $1 million bond has been set on the Joshua Sawyer case, and the grand jury recommended a $1 million bond on the new case.
LaHood says when Jones walks out of the Lane Murray Unit of the Texas Prison for Women in Gatesville next March, a Bexar County Sheriff's cruiser will be there, and she will be taken to the Bexar County jail where she will be held on $1 million bond, pending trial on these new charges.
Prosecutors in the 1980s said Jones, who has consistently denied wrongdoing, suffered from a condition now known as 'Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy' where care givers intentionally harm those in their care, only to swoop in at the last minute to save them and look heroic, or watch them die so the caregiver can absorb the sympathy and well wishes. But later, they say, Jones became 'intoxicated' with having the power of life and death over her little victims.
Even though murder of a person under the age of 5 is a capital murder today, LaHood says under laws in place at the time of the offense, the most Jones can get on both counts is 99 years. But, since she is 66 years old today, that ought to be enough to make sure she stays behind bars.
LaHood held out the possibility that additional charges against Jones may be forthcoming.