Transcript of Night Shift I 5. Trials and Tribulations

Hi, I'm Dan Jones, and This is History: A Dynasty to Die For is back for a brand new season. This time we meet Edward II, a larger-than-life character who starts out as the Party Boy Prince and ends up... Well, I don't want to give too much away. He's got one thing on his mind, not war, not ambition, but love. It's a love that will get him in burning hot trouble with his barons, his family, and his queen. The king's affection for his favorite night kicks off a wild roller coaster rain full of love and hate, war and grief, famine, and just about all the horsemen of the Apocalypse. Along the way, we'll meet Tiger Mums, Scottish legends, murderous cousins, a herd of camels, and one extremely hot, Iron Poker. Listen to and follow This is History, A Dynasty to Die For, available wherever you get your podcasts.

The Bench.

Campside Media. In December In the year of 1993, Richard Williams resigned from his job as a nurse at the VA Hospital in Columbia, Missouri. About a year and a half had passed since allegations broke that he was an angel of death. Then, within a few months, Despite the pending FBI investigation, he was hired on full-time at a different job, and not just another job. It was a job with even more power than he had previously. He was now working with arguably an even more vulnerable population of patients. Williams was named Director of Nursing at a nursing home in Ashtland, Missouri, a town just south of Columbia. And here's the thing I find most unbelievable. According to the St. Louis newspaper, Riverfront Times. The VA had even written Williams a letter of recommendation for his new gig. My father, Eddie Edelstein, couldn't believe it either. He had watched the FBI investigation into Williams grind to a halt. So you can imagine how he felt when he saw a report from the Missouri Board of Nursing about Williams tenure at his new job. According to the report, in the 12 months Nurse Williams had worked at the nursing home, 30 people died.

That is an astonishing number. Let me break it down for you. Over a 22-month period between 1993 and 1995, Ashland HealthCare recorded a total of 36 deaths. Of these 36 deaths, 30 of them occurred during the 12 months that Williams worked there. During the other 10 months, when Williams did not work there, there were only six deaths. So this could be a statistical anomaly. But it sure appeared that William's time in Ashland had coincided with a second string of mysterious deaths. Now, by the time my dad learned about this, William was already gone from Ashland. After only six months in his new position, he was fired, as was an administrator. This was after the state inspections found issues with the facility's overall care and cleanliness. He was never accused of wrongdoing related to the deaths. He just left the nursing home and fated away. The investigation back at dad's own hospital wasn't dead, but it had certainly stalled. The FBI had exhumed the bodies of 13 VA patients. The VA and the FBI brought on a famous medical examiner named Dr. Michael Baddon to do the autopsies. But then the bureau had gone quiet. So what the hell was the FBI doing?

According to news reports, the FBI had been dealing with two other much higher profile cases, Waco and the first World Trade Center bombing. My dad thought it was a lame excuse.

It's actually quite unbelievable. As a medical examiner, we get toxicology all the time on every patient that dies. So the argument that they gave me was that because they were so busy studying the people who died in the Waco disaster that they didn't have time to do this. That clearly doesn't make any sense. There's entire laboratories, the National Medical Laboratory, devoted the entire thing to doing toxicology. They actually had done it in a record time, I'm sure. So it doesn't make any sense at all. It just means they didn't want to know. I actually believe they did the toxicology intended to ignore it.

To my dad, this was an outrage. He did not want to sit on the sidelines, and finally an opportunity presented itself for him to speak out. He was asked to testify against the VA in an emerging civil case. To do this, he would need to gather evidence to suggest that the VA should have handled the accusations against Williams more seriously. The report from the Missouri Board of Nursing could give him an opening. But when he asked the organization for the documents, they denied his request. At first, they even denied that the report existed. So dad decided to take matters into his own hands. He called the nursing home himself.

As a medical examiner, you have powers. You say, This is Eddie Adelstein, the medical examiner. They come right to the phone because you're like a policeman. They think you have stuff on them. They know you wouldn't be calling them unless there's something funny, something weird, like it's some death. It shouldn't be. So when I called, of course, they let me in there.

Ned jumped in his car and made the 20-minute trip from the VA to Ashland to do a little digging.

You feel like a detective because you are a detective. You're checking it out and seeing it. You don't really know what you're looking for, but you're just looking.

He pulled up in front of a one-story L-shaped building off the highway. The rooms for the residence looked out at some nice trees with rustling green leaves. It was a tranquil setting meant to be the backdrop for peaceful twilight years. Dad asked if he could review the cases of people who died under William's supervision.

I probably spent two or three days there going through the records.

It was a lot of material, and dad wasn't allowed to leave with it. So he basically camped out at Ashland, pouring over death notes from morning to night. And he began to notice a pattern in the notes written by Richard Williams that gave him the creeps.

The part that was interesting to me was he wrote very detailed notes about their death, like they're breathing slower, their color looks funny. It was almost as though he was documenting their deaths. Not normally. Not most people don't. So I considered it unusual and strange for him to do that.

Williams was observing his patients and writing detailed notes every 10 minutes or so, like a scientist might for lab rats. Dad's numbers started looking a lot like Gordon's. Death rates spiked when Williams was on duty. Also, when Williams worked in Ashland, the number of patient deaths quadrupled compared to a typical year, four times the standard number of deaths.

And I recognize what a horrible thing it was to put him in charge of a population of the most vulnerable people there are.

From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, you're listening to Witnessed: Nightshift. This is episode 5, Trials and Tribulations. I'm Jake Edelstein. The following interview is being videotaped at the Dade County Public Safety Department, Miami, Dade County, Florida. And sir, would you identify yourself? My name is Ronway. I'm proud to be 30. In In '76, a man in Florida tells a cop he has a confession to make. Arriving in Miami, I proceeded to do certain things that I considered to be necessary in the crime that I planned to commit. I was looking for a hitchhiker, potential victim. But instead of becoming his victim, I became his confidante, one of the people closest to him, as he recounted and was tried for his horrific crimes. From Orbit Media and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to My Friend, the Serial Killer. Subscribe on Apple podcast to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcast. In the fall of 1992, the FBI launched their investigation into the cluster of unexpected deaths on Ward 4 east at the VA hospital. And in early statements from investigators, the bureau said that the death had to be unnatural. An agent on the case even said as much to one of the families.

Here's a clip from ABC Primetime, which cover the case in the late '90s. Despite their inability to determine And the cause of the death, the FBI believed the veterans were the victims of foul play. At least that's what one agent told Agnes Conover's family. I'm going to play a tape here, which you're familiar with, because it is a conversation that you tape with an FBI agent.

I said, I think that probably your mother did not die from natural causes.

But then a year went by, and another the year.

So the FBI, which initially started this investigation with hard work and honesty, basically suddenly wouldn't answer her phone calls and disappeared, literally disappeared for a couple of years.

The Bureau, for reasons that were unclear to my dad and Gordon and others at the hospital, was acting like there was nothing to these allegations of murder. Word about this tall investigation even spread to Washington, DC. And I haven't heard a peep from the attorney general, nor have I heard anything from the FBI. So what in the world is going on? This is Iowa Senator Charles Grassley pressing FBI Director Louis Free in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is a very important case, and why can't I get straight answers?

Senator, it certainly is an important case and one that should be investigated and accounted for forthrightly. I will get you a response to the extent that I can with respect to those questions.

But answers didn't come. And meanwhile, the clock was ticking because the FBI had used a civil rights investigation to give itself jurisdiction over the case. The statute of limitations was only five years. It seems a little odd to me that Dr. Baden was only ordered to run the toxicology reports around four years into the investigation, right when time was almost up. So now you get the picture. The feds had five years to finalize this case, and four of them were spent in a standstill because the tissue samples were left untouched in a freezer. Whether this was intentional or just ineptitude, the FBI was going to let the case expire, and that probably would have been the end of the matter, with no accountability for anyone involved. But then, out of the blue, a lawyer named John Kurtz arrived on a white horse with a bald eagle perched on his arm.

Oh, yes, it's a giant eagle.

How are you doing? Hey. Did you want to see the eagle over there?

I would love to see the eagle. We did want to see the eagle.

Well, hey, come on, you didn't get to see it.

Okay, not a literal eagle, but a big painting of one. It was on the side of the tall brick building in Kansas City, where John Kurtz has worked for 25 years. There was a smaller bald eagle on his business card, too. When Shoko and I, and our producer, Amy, arrived, Kurtz was wearing an American flag necktie that waved in the wind. Kurtz is tall, really tall, with sunken eyes and woolly-white eyebrows. He looked like lurch from the Adams family. But being around him, you feel like you're hanging out with a real-life Attica's Finch. As we entered his law office and sat down around a big wooden table, it became clear that this guy truly believes in an ideal America where all men and women actually are created equal.

Patronism equates with attention for the down and out. And as a plaintiff's lawyer, we represent those people.

People like the family of a VA patient named Elsy Havreum. Without someone like Kurtz, Elsy might have just died quietly and been forgotten. Elsy Havreum was a born and bred Missourian. His life was a classic 20th century American story. He married his wife, Helen, when they were teenagers. Within months of the wedding, he was drafted into the army to fight in World War II. But while he was in the Philippines, Elsy suffered from a shrapnel injury to his face and a bad case of malaria. He was shipped back to the US with a Purple heart on his chest. After he came back, Elsy and Helen started a family and raised three kids together. Elsy supported his family by working long hours at the factory, firing bricks. Here's his son, David.

He worked there probably, I don't know, 45 years or something like that. See how they were real dusty in there. I remember him probably back when he was like 40 years old, 45.

I can remember him having breathing problems then.

So he had them for a long time.

Eventually, Elsy was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD. By the time he was in his 60s, his breathing problems were so bad that he was regularly in and out of the VA hospital in Columbia. On June 14, 1992, David and his wife, Sydney, went to an auction in Kansas City. When they got home, they found out that Elsy's breathing problem was acting up again. One of his granddaughters drove him to the VA, and he was admitted for observation and treatment. Sydney and David went to see him that evening. Doctors had stabilized Elsy, and he was alert and able to communicate. Here's Sydney talking about it. He had sitting on the edge of the bed, put a wash track over his head because he was hot. He asked for a painkiller, and Sydney and David waited with him until it kicked in. We stayed there at about 11:30, and then we come on home. Sydney and David planned to get some rest and go back to the VA to see Elsy the next day. But then an hour and a half later, the phone rang. It was their niece.

And Angie then called us about one or two, whatever time it was.

I said he died. Did that come as a shock to you?

It did come as a shock because I've been talking.

We've been talking to him and carrying on with him, and it comes a shock. The official cause of Elzie's death was listed as COPD. However, a doctor who later examined Elsy's chart was disturbed by what he found. How could a man in stable condition, whose only complaint was a headache, wind up dead in a matter of hours? People with COPD can live even into their 90s with the right treatment. Elsy was only 66, and his condition, when arriving at the VA, had not been dire. I've seen other people that are sick die, and it takes a while, and it's a slow process. None of that happened with him. I mean, he just was setting up one minute, and boom, he dead. Elsy's death was shocking enough. But then came the calls from the FBI and the press, and then Months later, agents asking the family permission to dig up Elsy's body. It was actually Elsy's grave, where in the last episode, reporter Rudy Keller held vigil for 24 hours, waiting for the FBI to return the body. And so Elsy was among the 13 veterans who had a tissue sample, a piece of his flesh, waiting in a freezer for four years as the FBI apparently tried to wait out the clock on the investigation as the Havreum family sat at home and waited for some news.

They didn't know what to do. Until one day, the Havrems told their story to a lady who came to look at a piece of real estate they were selling. She happened to be a lawyer. And she said, I'll tell you who could see to that or maybe do something about it would be John Kurtz. It seemed like a long shot. No lawyer in their right mind would want to go up against an institution like the VA, backed by FBI, and ultimately the United States of America. But when the family reached out to John Kurtz, he did not need to be convinced.

My father was a World War II veteran. My great-grandfather fought in the Union Army on the north side of the flag in the American Civil War. And so I've always been moved by veterans.

Kurtz went down to the Havreum's ranch-style home in Fulton to meet the family, including Elsy's widow, Helen Havreum.

She She was a dream plaintiff in that she wasn't loud, she wasn't vicious, she wasn't vulgar, she was just pure sweetness. In that first meeting, I loved that lady, and I loved her family.

Kurtz dove into the case. He tried getting some of the other families to join the lawsuit without success. Maybe they'd already gone through enough. So it was just the haverms standing up for themselves, but also in a way, standing in for the 41 other families who were still waiting for answers. Kurtz would be going up against the United States government, and he needed every weapon he could get his hands on. He gathered evidence, spoke to witnesses, Sometimes he did trial prep in the chambers of the presiding judge.

I remember very clearly one time, Judge Nennet Lowry saying something like this, Mr. Kurtz, I see you have a very difficult uphill road in this case. You have a long, long way to go. Do you understand that? And I said, Yes, ma'am, I do. I just wanted to make sure. You intend to go there? Yes, ma'am, I do.

Now, Judge Lowry wasn't being a naysayer. It's just that Kurtz was representing a humble family from Fulton, Missouri, and his opponent, the United States government, had a team of US attorneys with almost unlimited resources and an unlimited budget. This case would be a modern-day battle of David versus Goliath. The Havreum case was filed in the Western district, Missouri, the presiding Judge, Nannette Lowry, knew the stakes were high for the hospital because really, that's who was on trial here, the VA, not Richard Williams.

This case really was about the negligence of the VA, not not the culpability of the nurse.

In other words, Kurtz's job wasn't to prove that Richard Williams was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Rather, he would have to convince the judge that the preponderance of evidence showed that Williams had killed Elsy Hauveram, thus resulting in Elsy's wrongful death, and that the VA could have reasonably prevented it from happening, but did not. But of course, proving all that meant that Kurtz also had to investigate the prime a suspect in those deaths, former VA nurse Richard Williams. As he prepared for trial, Kurtz learned more about where Williams had been before and after working at the VA.

I know that Richard Williams had questionable nursing practices at his prior employment in Springfield, at his subsequent employment in Ashland, including deaths in Ashtland.

We told you about Ashtland earlier in the episode. Road. But before he worked at the VA, Williams worked as an LPN, a licensed practical nurse at St. John's Hospital in Springfield, Missouri. And he'd been fired from the institution for failure to distribute medication and falsifying charts. Kurtz also learned about someone close to Williams, his wife, Melissa. The two had met in the late 1980s when Richard was working for Texas County Memorial Hospital in Houston, Missouri. Melissa was a senior in high school, volunteering at the hospital as a candy striper. Richard began attending the church where Melissa played piano, and they got married there soon after. Later, they'd end up working at the Columbia VA at the same time. At the time of the suspicious deaths, Melissa was actually a nurse working on 5 east, one floor above her husband on 4 east. Throughout the investigation, she claimed her husband was innocent. In an FBI interview, she even claimed that she had overheard another nurse get drunk at a party and claimed that he was the murderer. The FBI looked into this lead and nothing came of it, but it shows that Melissa Williams didn't shy away from the investigation, and she was willing to go to bed for her husband.

Kurtz also learned about another incident, and it pointed to a secret the couple was keeping. In November of 1994, almost a year after Richard Williams left the Columbia VA, the Ashland police got a phone call at 11:37 in the night. It was Richard on the line. He told him that he'd been trying to leave his trailer home when Melissa had hit him in the face. An officer named Jack Hastings drove to Golden Wind Mill, the trailer park where Mr. And Mrs. Williams lived. Richard was waiting outside. Officer Hastings could see that Richard had a scratch under his eye and a red mark on the right side of his face. Richard claimed Melissa had been throwing things around the room, and that's when she'd hit him in the face. He said he had sat on his wife to keep her from whaling on him. He insisted that he didn't want Melissa to get arrested. He just wanted to get his stuff so that he could escape for the night. Officer Hastings said, I get to make the call if anyone is arrested. To which Richard responded, Fine. I wasn't hit. The officer pointed out that there were obvious physical marks on his face.

Then he went inside to speak to Melissa, and she had a different story to tell. Melissa said she had tried to leave. When Richard physically restrained her, she hit him. Then came the real bombshell. Melissa told the officer that they had been fighting about the FBI's investigation, and things escalated when Melissa urgent her husband to confess to the VA murders.

She was trying to get him to confess that he'd done it. I presume she thought he'd had.

Up to this point, Melissa had seemed to be on Richard's side. Now she wanted him to fess up to the murders? She seemed to have reached a breaking point and told the officer she was planning to file for divorce the next day. We have a copy of Officer Hastings' incident report. Ultimately, he decided not to arrest either Richard or Melissa, and he allowed Richard to get some clothes and leave. The next day, the police got another call, this time from Melissa. She was worried about Richard because he hadn't come home. When the officer on the phone pressed Melissa about her wanting Richard to confess, she backtracked. This time, talking to a cop, she said that she didn't think he had anything to do with the deaths at the VA hospital. Melissa did say that Richard's behavior had worried her. She caught him looking at a medical book to see, How much you would have to take of a drug to kill yourself. Later, that same day, Officer Hastings went back to the trailer park and found Richard had returned. He told the officer he and Melissa were working things out, and Richard and Melissa were still together by the time the Have Room case got underway.

We reached out to Melissa, but she didn't respond to us. Most of what we know of her perspective comes from her deposition with Kurtz. She also declined to take the stand at trial. In fact, Kurtz was struggling to find anyone helpful who would testify.

There were loads of people at the VA Medical Center who were scared to talk, didn't want to talk. God bless them. I understand it perfectly.

But there were some exceptions to that rule.

But there were nurses who, when we took the depositions, they were willing to talk.

Two nurses in particular. Kurtz took their depositions, and what they told him was chilling.

I said, I said, You worked there with him? Yeah. Was there ever any conduct of his that you particularly remember that relates to the death of veterans? Yes, there was. What was it? Well, one night, I had lost three veterans overnight, which is a large number. He, Richard Williams, came in with a big smile on his face and said, What are you trying to do? Race me? Another nurse was testifying. I said, Were there any particular memories you had about his referring to the death of patients? Yes. One morning, I came in. There had been five die overnight. And he looked at me with a smile on his face. I said, I took five more out last night.

We found the transcript of this exchange, and it looks like Kurtz is misremembering the However, according to this nurse, Williams had said, I took another three out last night. Still, if you believe these stories, it almost sounded like the nurse was playing a very deadly game. And the VA had just let that game play out? It was infuriating to him.

Not that we just gave them negligent care. We gave them death sentences in our facility.

Kurt now had the depositions, but he was still lacking one thing, key witnesses who were willing to speak a trial. Without it, his case would seem flimsy in court. Luckily for Kurtz, there were two employees crazy enough to speak out against the shady hand that buttered their bread.

Lo, I stand at the door and knock. I was knocking, and we were knocking, and Adelstein and Chr. Had the courage to speak up.

Now, Kurtz had allies in his impossible fight against the US government. He needed them, considering the system seemed to be protecting Richard Williams.

You realize that this gentleman was protected by all the wrong things, by the entire legal system in the United States, the FBI, the I. G. Of the VA. Everybody worked the best they could legally to protect him from being prosecuted. Executed.

Elzie Havrim died in 1992. Six years later, his family finally got their day in court. On July 27, 1998, the trial of Helen Havrim versus the United States of America began. The trial didn't take place in your standard courtroom. It was held in an auditorium, essentially a classroom that was also a courtroom at the law school, ironically, a block away from the VA hospital, right on the campus of the University of Missouri. It was a very public event. You might call it a circus. Almost every day, there were swarms of media and locals stepping in to see what was going on. They were curious to see if the family from rural Missouri was actually going to pull off suing the VA for wrongful death. First to take the stand was Gordon.

Dr. Gordon Chr. Was allowed to give testimony that the chances of all these deaths happening as they did by chance rather than by causation of some force or something was one in a million.

It was a bitter sweet moment for Gordon. He had been trying to speak publicly about his research for half a decade, and he'd finally gotten the chance. My dad had his own challenging path to the witness stand. The VA and the US government made it clear to him that they did not want him to testify. They tried to stop him.

So when I testified in the Havreum case, as I got ready to testify, the lawyers for the FBI said to me, We don't believe that you can testify. We believe if you do, we'll have to charge you with a crime because you work for the VA and we don't think you can testify. And Dr. Dix, who's a medical examiner, doesn't think you should testify either.

Dad himself had a lot to lose, his position at the VA and a government pension for retirement. Dad loved that job and poured his time and energy into it, and the VA could take it away in a split second if they wanted to. But dad could not be swayed. He pointed out a loophole that the VA was not his sole employer. He also worked part-time for the county as a coroner.

So I said, Well, you understand I only work for the VA five-eighths of the time, so I'm testifying on the time that I wasn't working for the VA.

Everyone knew that this was a big case for the US government. They stood to lose not only face, but money. The Veterans Administration Management had said nothing happened. The FBI told Congress and the Havrems that they found no evidence of criminal activity. If the government were to lose this case, they would all look likeools, and it would reopen a file that the FBI and the US government seemed to feel was completely closed and behind them. Men like Gordon and my dad were obstacles. They needed to discredit them, and they were ready to do it.

So I got up and testified for a couple of hours. At one point, the prosecutor said to me, Isn't it true that you don't take yourself seriously as the medical examiner. And I said, That's true. I don't take myself seriously, but I take my work seriously. And then I saw an opportunity to go somewhere they didn't want to go. I said, But let me tell you what my role has been in this as a medical examiner. I went to the actual nursing home where he received a letter from the director of the VA saying that he was qualified to take care of anybody. And while he was there, 30 people died. So then when I got done with that statement, the prosecutor said, Get them off the stand.

Despite the impassion testimony from my dad and Gordon, the odds that the government would be found responsible remained slim.

Our case was built upon the idea that there had been many, many deaths there, and that we had expert testimony of varying varieties, but the government had Michael Baden.

Dr. Baden was the famous medical examiner brought on by the FBI and the VA. Baden, of course, was someone the judge would take seriously as an authority on these deaths. He had actually examined the 13 bodies. Gordon and Eddie had never gotten that opportunity. Now, originally, Baden said none of the 13 people had died of natural deaths. Death. He couldn't determine a cause of death for any of them.

He didn't define anything. He said, I cannot agree that they died in accordance with what's on the death certificate. That's all he said. Well, then he turned And he said, But they didn't die from this. They didn't die from that.

Up until this point in the trial, Kurtz's argument had in part rested on the idea that Williams used Codine to kill the patients.

And Botts, No, no, it wasn't Codine. It was not Codine. But his position was, You can't prove any of these deaths were caused by the things that you're saying about. And he was a total defense witness, and he was wiping out the 42 deaths altogether including Elsy Ever.

Baden was doing exactly what the government had hoped he would do. He'd undermined Kurtz's argument and even undermined the idea that there was anything unusual about the deaths at all. If Baden denied that Codine was what killed Elsy, arguing instead that he died by natural causes, well, that was a death blow to their case. But then with Baden on the stand, Kurt saw an opportunity, and he sure as heck took it.

I said, Doctor, you have said, have you not, that there are ways that you know about to kill people that no one will ever be able to detect the means of death? And I'm just looking at him, eye to eye, about 10 feet away, thinking, Come on, Mike. Come on with it here. And he says, That is true. I have said that. I said, Would you give us examples? He listed about four examples off, and certain mixtures of this and that, so on. So he said it. Now, here's where it went now. We're in there proving codeine, codeine, codeine, codeine, with our expert witnesses. The government's expert witness says, There's ways to kill people that you'll never be able to identify what it is.

When we spoke with Dr. Botton, he didn't remember what methods he had discussed at the trial. But without hesitation, he rattled off four ways you could kill someone in a hospital, four ways that even a postmortem investigation wouldn't reveal. Anyway, this single exchange changed the whole focus of the trial. Codin Schmodin, the fact that this drug wasn't detected in Elsy's body didn't really matter anymore.

So what? We don't have to identify it. We have to just identify that he killed him.

It was a Perry Mason moment. Kurtz had just taken the government's witness, and well, he'd made Baden his ally. Kurtz took his seat after Baden's testimony, knowing full well that he'd changed the rules of the game because proving the cause of death had now become a secondary issue. Kurtz, along with the help of a fellow lawyer and a law student, had done some good work. He had argued Elsy Havrim had been killed, and the VA hadn't done enough to stop it. And with some help from dad, he had introduced the mysterious Theson Ashland into the record. Finally, he seemed to have turned the government's expert witness against them, making him an expert who bolstered the Havrems case. Now, it was all up to the judge. John Kurt spent about three years preparing for the VA trial. Over that time, he made multiple visits to the Habrum's family home. And through all the visits and conversations and all the days of trial, the family remained amazingly unraffled.

I never saw anybody in that family cry. Never. I thought, Well, these are just solid mid-Missou people.

Finally, a little over a week after testimony began, the last day of the trial arrived. It was August 7, 1998, a Friday. No one was as anxious to hear the verdict as the Havreum family. They had been helping Kurtz build the case for years now and were there every day of the trial. Here's Here's Elsy's daughter-in-law, Sydney. We didn't miss a minute of it. Not a minute. At 12:50 PM, Judge Lowry made her announcement. Journalist Rudy Keller was there.

And the judge said before she took a recess for lunch that she would make a decision in the afternoon.

And so I rushed to get a story out that it was coming, and then it was back to the courtroom to hear the verdict.

Judge Lowry wanted to make a ruling while all the evidence and testimony was fresh in her mind. It was a guiding principle she'd learned from another judge during her training.

Don't dobble. Go ahead and get it done. And that's what, in fact, I did.

She returned to her chambers and prepared to make a decision.

And so we had a very hectic, intense period, my law clerk and I, where we're making sure dotting every I, crossing every T, because once you say it out loud in the courtroom, you can't go back in the written record and say, Oh, really, that wasn't right. And really, I should have said it this way. You had to be sure.

After about 90 minutes, she returned to the bench with the ruling.

I'm sitting up on the table like this, and here she comes to read and deliver her opinion. More or less, the first words out of her mouth were these. By every bit of evidence in this case, it is extremely clear that Mr. Elzie Haver was a fine and very decent man. But that cannot be a reason to rule in favor of the plaintiff. At which time I sat there and I thought, Oh, my God. These people are sitting right behind me, and I have just lost this case. Oh, my God. And I will tell you at that point where I thought I had lost the case, I had a physical phenomenon that I've never duplicated anywhere, any place else. And this probably does not belong in anything you'd preserve. But my sinus has opened up and my nose was like a faucet. It's just on the table. And I'm seeing it and I'm thinking, What is this? And so I start waking up and then putting it on my socks.

And then While Kurtz's sinuses emptied like a cloud during a summer thunderstorm, Judge Lowry continued to read her verdict. I'm going to read you directly from her written order. Viewing the record as a whole, the court finds that the hospital was negligent in failing to take action to protect its patients prior to June 14th, 1992. Then she went on.

I must also find that it is more probable than not that Richard Williams killed El Elsy Havreum. Among other things, I considered the following: the inconsistencies and alterations in Elsy Havreum's death note, the decision not to call a code blue, the timing and location of death, Nurse Williams prior problems with not giving medication that he said he had given, the absence of a respiratory flow chart, the unexpected nature of the death, the absence of a natural depression.

To To be clear, Richard Williams had not been convicted of a crime. Remember, the case was not against him. It was a civil case against the VA hospital, and the VA, backed by the mighty US government, had lost. Kurtz and the Havrems had won. Sitting right behind Kurtz was Helen, her children, and the rest of the family who had been waiting on this day for six years.

I turned around and every single one of them was crying. The only time I ever saw them cry. It was just... It was so moving.

Helen Havrems was awarded $450,000 for the wrongful death of her husband and the validation that her instincts had been right. It was a highlight of Kurtz's career and a scathing judgment of the VA's response.

The VA is a government institution that we all expect to operate in a certain way, that they do our work for the whole society. And so we have more of a stake in it. The VA didn't intentionally do anything bad. But they were negligent, in my opinion, in the sense that they were aware of complaints and several complaints about this nurse and his conduct and unexplained deaths on this ward and didn't investigate it.

And though this hadn't been a criminal trial for Richard Williams, the judge had something to say on this matter. She believed he had killed Elzie Hathrom.

The statistical evidence was incredible. There was no explanation that was given by anybody, how there could be such a discrepancy between the deaths that were occurring on the night shift during that time period that this nurse had become the supervisor of that ward. And I think that was very persuasive.

Decades later, Lowry stands by her decision.

It's always nice to feel like you did what was, quote, right. Sometimes the law is consistent with what's right. And this was one of those times. I never thought that the Haverns were interested in money. I thought that the Havrems were interested in changing the practices at the VA hospital.

That's a really important point. If you don't punish institutions for neglect, they have no reason to change. That is one of the reasons we have a legal system. So even if Richard Williams hadn't been held responsible, it was almost as important to put the VA on trial. Because if they chose PR over patients once and got away with it, what's to stop them from doing it again and again and again? The government had lost this case, and the vertical had a fire under the ass of the FBI. But it had another effect, too. It really angered the Veterans Administration, which wasn't just going to give up. In fact, the VA seemed determined to exact revenge on the employees who had testified against them, especially two men, Dr. Gordon Christensen and Dr. Eddie Adelstein, my dad. Next time on Witnessed: Night Shift.

Then a week later, they announced that they were sending a team to investigate me for stealing drugs. That's just like, they don't care. I I mean, they're just like, How many mean things can they do to you?

It was a very frightening years there. I remember Gordon and Andy swept our house thinking that there might be bugs.

This is a case from the very, very beginning that has been botched by everybody, not just the FBI, but everybody.

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