Reportedly, seven nurses in the ICU at Sunrise Hospital wagered on when their patients would die. They were seen stuffing cash into an envelope, along with their best guesses scribbled on a sheet of paper.

One nurse, Supervisor Jani Adams, even tampered with life-support systems to help her friends win.

Deathbed Spread
“ANGEL OF DEATH!” screamed the New York Post, “Nurse Accused of Pulling Plug in Lethal Hospital Betting Scandal.”

“It seems like something out of fever-level fiction,” Walter Cronkite, the most trusted voice in the history of televised news, told America on the evening of April 2.

Sunrise Hospital immediately suspended all seven employees and investigated six recent ICU deaths as being potentially suspicious.

The Angel of Death was Adams, of course. The 32-year-old was arrested and indicted for murder by a Nevada grand jury that believed that she cut off oxygen to a patient named Vincent Fraser.

Of the original six cases investigated, Fraser’s was deemed the most promising to prosecute. His widow even confirmed that she’d been asked to sign a mortuary release form the day before her husband died, adding to the speculation that his death was predetermined.

One of the officers who led Adams away in handcuffs was so incensed by what he believed to be her callous attitude toward human life, he threatened her with the gas chamber.

Walter Was Wrong
Fever-level fiction is what it was. The myth originated from a simple misreading of a few situations by Barbara Farro, a Sunrise nurse new to the night shift, and by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

After hearing Adams and the other nurses inappropriately gossip about the death of a female patient while playing cards, she mistakenly got the impression that the woman’s life-support machine had been tampered with, and that Fraser was “next on the list” to die.

The whole sick game came together in Farro’s mind when she saw cash being placed into an envelope and passed around the room.

Farro went to the police, who leaked the story to the R-J. Its “scoop” of March 13, 1980 quoted Nevada Governor Robert List as saying he “would like to think the whole thing a figment of somebody’s imagination but there appears to be a good deal of smoke and fire both.”

The R-J story also quoted a chief Clark County health officer as saying that “turning oxygen off periodically would weaken a patient’s heart, causing the person to die hours later without the reason being directed attributed to the life support system.”

Adams’ case wasn’t helped by the gallows humor that she, like many whose jobs deal with life and death on the daily, developed a taste for employing to cut the unrelenting stress.카지노사이트 모음

If no one but fellow hospital workers were within earshot when a patient died on her watch, Adams was known to say, “Well, I killed another one!” One nurse said she once saw Adams stand beside a bed and say, “Come on, Marian, die!”