The Death Shift: The True Story of Nurse Genene Jones and the Texas Baby Murders.

• Author: Brinton, Henry G.

The Death Shift: The True Story of Nurse Genene Jones and the Texas Baby Murders. Peter Elkind. Viking, 19.95. It's diabolical enough that Nurse Genene Jones murdered as many as 16 babies in the early 1980s. But what is more chilling is the failure of a San Antonio public hospital and medical school to account for such heinous criminal activity. Scared of lawsuits and negative publicity, the medical establishment did nothing to bring suspicious

deaths to the attention of law enforcement officials. Instead, it simply attributed these deaths to organizational "growing pains," poor staff morale, and lack of effective leadership. Nurse Jones was removed during a staff reorganization, and ushered off to further employment (and further murder) with a recommendation. Peter Elkind presents this story as a first-rate murder mystery, with such characters as an egomaniacal hospi-

tal administrator who once entered a meeting to the musical theme from Star Wars, a 300-pound snuff-dipping judge, and a Mickey Spillane gumshoe who calls pretty girls "dollies" and bad guys "scumbags." At the center of the mystery is Genene Jones, a bizarre, complex woman who lavished affection on infants as she injected them with a variety of lethal drugs. When babies began to die mysteriously, her hours on duty became known around the hospital as "the Death Shift." But a hospital committee investigation failed to uncover proof of wrongdoing and recommended judicious silence on the issue." It was not until Jones moved to a clinic in a small town, and began to kill again, that several local doctors blew the whistle and had the nurse arrested. Somehow, personal responsibility is choked by the bureaucratic tangle of hospital administration. San Antonio's Medical Center Hospital is, after all, an institution that employs not only an executive director, but a senior associate executive director, three associate...