For 32 years, dozens of deaths tied to nurse at Columbia’s VA hospital have been unresolved

Harry S Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital in Columbia (Rudi Keller/Missouri Independent).

In September 1992, as I performed one of the perfunctory duties of my job as assistant city editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune — watching the nightly local news to keep up with our competitors — a startling story came on KMIZ.

Stephen Gaither, a spokesman for Harry S Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital, described to the reporter the hospital’s response to an unexpected increase in patient deaths in one ward.

I immediately called Gaither and asked him about the statement. He gave me essentially the same information.

How many deaths were involved, he didn’t say. What he did say was that a review had been completed and the hospital had nothing to hide.

Except it did.

Over 14 days starting on Sept. 26, 1992, the Tribune published 15 stories under my byline that followed the case from Gaither’s initial statement to an FBI criminal investigation of as many as 50 patients possibly murdered by a nurse.

When that figure was revealed to me in a meeting with hospital sources worried about an ongoing coverup, held in the law office of then-state Rep. Ken Jacob, I promised I would follow the case until the truth became known.

“The information I have is not legally conclusive,” Jacob said at the time. “But personally, after looking at it, it is horrifying even to think about the possibilities.”

In those first 15 stories, I was the first to name the nurse, Richard Williams, who had been removed from patient care while the internal review was underway. Williams was charged with 10 counts of homicide in 2002, but the case was dropped in 2004 when his attorney was able to show that a chemical cited as the basis of the charge can be found naturally in decomposing bodies.

The only time any of the families received even a modest amount of justice was in August 1998, when U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey awarded the family of Elzie Havrum of Fulton $450,000 compensation in a civil trial and excoriated Truman Memorial administrators for the cover up.

“I believe nurse Williams killed Elzie Havrum,” Laughrey said at the conclusion of the trial. 

She also said she was “convinced the VA staff was alerted to the relationship between Richard Williams and deaths prior to Elzie Havrum’s final admission.”

Now another journalist with a personal connection to the story is taking a new look at the case. In a seven-episode podcast called “Witnessed: Night Shift,” Columbia native Jake Adelstein and his co-host Shoko Plambeck narrate the story through interviews and archival reports. The podcast is published by Sony Music and Campside Media.

Adelstein, author of “Tokyo Vice,” is the son of Eddie Adelstein, a pathologist who initiated the internal hospital inquiry into the deaths in the summer of 1992.

Eddie Adelstein, as well as Gordon Christensen, the epidemiologist he asked to review the deaths for a common cause, and Eddie Dick, the hospital chief of staff at the time, suffered years of harassment, retaliation and intimidation — first for internally, and later publicly, agitating for a true accounting for the deaths and the effort to cover them up.

The personal connection is just one reason for the podcast, Adelstein told me. If Williams is responsible for the deaths, he said, it means one of the largest cases of serial killing in U.S. history has gone unpunished.

“The case is not closed; there is no statute of limitations on homicide,” Adelstein said. “And what it gives the public is a question that they should demand answers to: what really happened on the night shift at the Truman VA and why did those who covered it up get rewarded and those who told the truth get punished?”

I enter the podcast in the third episode, after Adelstein presents a detailed look at how the string of deaths first were noticed, then reviewed, then denied, by the hospital administration. In one of the kinder things ever said about me, he describes me as the “custodian of the story.”

It occurs to me as I write this that it is the first time I have published something about the VA hospital deaths since the death of Christensen in 2020. But it also reminds me that since I am still writing about it, the case is not resolved.

I have vivid memories of events that mark important developments in the case.

One is my first encounter with Williams, at his home to confirm his identity as the nurse removed from patient care. 

Another is a cold February day and a night in a Fulton cemetery after I found that the FBI had exhumed Havrum’s remains for an autopsy. I wanted to get a photo of his remains being reinterred. When exhaustion overtook me, I left without getting the picture.

And there were a few moments of real personal anguish that maybe Williams, who continues to live in Missouri, was just the unluckiest person who ever lived and I had wronged him in print.

I remember when Christensen called me when he wanted to speak publicly for the first time. 

Christensen’s role in the story is central to the conclusion that nothing but Williams connected the deaths. He analyzed all hospital deaths over a three-year period, both the circumstances and the underlying medical conditions of each.

He concluded that the deaths associated with Williams, who worked nights, were of patients who were not expected to die soon — many actually were ready for discharge the next morning. And there was an infinitesimally small chance that the deaths were due to any natural occurrence.

Christensen called — after rebuffing all my previous attempts — when an inspector general’s report that reviewed his findings and investigated allegations of a cover up was released. It confirmed his analysis by saying he overstated the chance that something other than Williams had been responsible for the deaths.

But investigators said they found mismanagement, not a cover up.

I followed Christensen, Adelstein and Dick to Washington three times for congressional hearings concerning the deaths.

At the first, in October 1995, Christensen was brutal in his assessment of the inspector general’s report.

“The report is wrong because it is an incomplete, dishonest, biased, flawed and distorted presentation of the events that took place in Columbia,” Christensen said at the time. “The report is dangerous because acceptance of this report promotes the cover-up of this mess and endorses the VA’s policy of intimidation of whistleblowers.”

At the last hearing I attended, in March 1999, U.S. Rep. Terry Everett, an Alabama Republican, chaired a subcommittee of the House Veterans Affairs Committee and he said little had changed since the first in 1995.

“My concerns about the VA culture of tolerating favoritism, cronyism, harassment, and retaliation are a matter of record,” Everett said that day.

Throughout the 1990s, I tried to keep my focus as much as possible on the families involved in the case. In early 1993, when the FBI began exhuming 13 of the veterans who died under Williams’ care, I used a list of everyone who had died in the previous year at Truman Memorial to identify nine of them.

Calling their next-of-kin, I had to ask a very strange question: “Have you been contacted by the FBI about the death of your husband/wife/uncle/aunt/father/mother?”

For those who hadn’t been contacted, the question needed explaining. For those who had, I was usually the one who ended up answering a lot of questions because the investigators didn’t want to talk much. 

They just wanted permission to perform an autopsy. 

As part of my work, I found that veterans from Rolla, Cuba, Fulton, Columbia and many other places had died during Williams’ shifts. Two years later, I called the families again. No, they said, they hadn’t heard anything more from the FBI. 

To the FBI, they were the forgotten families, I wrote.

I visited Bea Forster in Cuba in Crawford County, who had had trouble sleeping since the death of her husband Charles, who served in the U.S. Army in the South Pacific in World War II. 

Agnes Leedom of Glenwood in Schuyler County recalled her husband Gerald, who played saxophone for a band called the Missouri Hot Shots when they married in 1936. His electric piano was still in her living room when we met in 1995.

I listened to Cindy Owens and Doris Bojack, daughters of Agnes Conover — a seaman in World War II — describe their anguish at not knowing how her mother died.

Bojack’s words describe how I still feel about the case.

“It just keeps nagging at you,” she said. “We need some closure, and we need to find out what really did happen.”