‘Chilling’ Postscript to Saldivar Case Revealed

Self-described “Angel of Death” Efren Saldivar gave a second “much more chilling” confession to Glendale police last year, law enforcement officials disclosed Tuesday after the former respiratory therapist pleaded guilty to six murder counts under a plea bargain that will spare him the death penalty.

Saldivar, who initially confessed in 1998, reportedly said in the second confession that he used paralyzing drugs to kill 60 hospital patients by 1994 and “lost count” after that, though he kept killing for at least three more years. He also was said to have compared killing to shoplifting a piece of gum, commenting that once you’ve done it “you don’t think about it for the rest of the day, or ever.”

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance Ito scheduled sentencing for April 17, when the former Tujunga resident will receive six terms of life in prison without parole for his killing spree at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. During the 20-minute plea proceedings Tuesday, Saldivar also waived his right to appeal his conviction or sentence.

“You will spend the rest of your life in prison and you will eventually die in prison,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Albert MacKenzie told Saldivar, 32, who bowed his head and said “guilty” to the six murder counts and another for attempted murder in a barely audible voice.

After the plea, Saldivar’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Verah Bradford, said that he had chosen to admit his guilt “not to avoid punishment but rather to accept responsibility and importantly to bring closure to the family members of the decedents and, of course, finally now, in his mind, make peace with God.”

At a news conference, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said his office decided not to fight for a death sentence in order to avert a costly trial, including “protracted litigation” over testing procedures used to detect the muscle relaxer Pavulon in the exhumed bodies of the elderly patients who died in 1996 and 1997.

Cooley and other officials on the case said they do not expect to ever know Saldivar’s full death toll.

In his unexpected 1998 confession, Saldivar estimated that he had given “40-something” lethal injections during his nine years as a graveyard shift respiratory therapist. He quickly recanted the confession, however, and maintained for three years that he had fabricated the stories of killing patients because he was depressed and wanted to die himself.

But on Tuesday, Cooley and Glendale Police Chief Russell Siverling revealed that Saldivar had confessed once again on Jan. 9, 2001, after he was arrested on his way to a construction job in the San Fernando Valley.

Siverling said the respiratory therapist was far more callous than in his first confession, in which he insisted that he killed patients to end their suffering. The second time, Saldivar said that simple “laziness” motivated some of his killing, along with annoyance at “patients [who] were crying out in some loud fashion, or noisy,” the police chief said.

“What we don’t believe is that the title ‘Angel of Death’ is appropriate,” Siverling added. “He was not that kind of mercy killer. These patients did not ask to be killed and their families did not ask that they be killed.”

But Saldivar provided no patient names or other details that would have enabled the prosecution team to pursue additional counts or accurately calculate the number of victims, MacKenzie said at the post-plea news conference.

“Mr. Saldivar has told so many different stories. ‘I killed people.’ ‘I didn’t kill people.’ I don’t think we’ll ever know,” the prosecutor said.

By entering guilty pleas, MacKenzie added, “I think he expressed remorse today.”

As part of the plea bargain, prosecutors agreed to drop one secondary count charging Saldivar with illegal possession of a sedative, Versed, found during a search of his home.

Cooley said the decision not to seek the death penalty was based in part on “the uncertainties of proffering new scientific protocols,” specifically the testing system developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to search for Pavulon and other drugs in tissue taken from bodies that had been buried for several years. He also cited the risks of relying on Saldivar’s “ambiguous self-serving admissions.”

Even without the death penalty, he said, Saldivar’s sentence “will serve as a deterrent to others who might harbor the misguided belief that such conduct in a hospital setting is either ethical or legal.”

None of the families of Saldivar’s victims attended the downtown Los Angeles court hearing Tuesday. But several relatives told the Times that they approved of the plea agreement, even though it precludes the possibility that Saldivar would be sent to the state’s death chamber, where he would have been injected with the same drug, Pavulon, that he used on his victims.

“I was afraid since he recanted his [1998] confession that somehow he might get a sentence where he could be out on the street again in a few years or maybe he’d get an insanity plea or something,” said Vickie Lowery, the great-niece of Myrtle Brower, 84, who died at Glendale Adventist on Aug. 2, 1997. “My fear was he’d just do this again. I’m pro-death [penalty], so my feelings are he should be put to sleep. But this is the next best thing. “Now I know Myrtle’s been taken care of,” said Lowery, 53, of Van Nuys. “Maybe now I can put all the boxes of files and records away. I kept everything of hers because I didn’t know what the police might want from me in court. I can kind of let go of it all and get on with my life.”

Larry Schlegel, whose 77-year-old mother, Eleanora, died on Jan. 2, 1997, said he was relieved not to have to testify at a trial.

“If he pleads out, that certainly saves us all of the frustrations of some other trials,” Schlegel said. “That would be a better outcome than some other trials here. With a trial, it’s going to get more emotional. I don’t mind being spared that.”

Hearing that Saldivar had now admitted killing Schlegel’s mother was so disturbing, he said, “I almost think it would have been best never to have known anything.”

Saldivar also pleaded guilty to killing Salbi Asatryan, 75; Jose Alfaro, 82; Luina Schidlowski, 87; and Balbino Castro, 87, between December 1996 and August 1997. He also admitted injecting a potentially lethal drug into the intravenous line of Jean Coyle, now 64, who was revived and lives in a nursing home.

Glendale Adventist Medical Center released a statement Tuesday offering prayers “for all who have been affected by these circumstances.”

“We are relieved that this four-year search for the truth seems to be at an end,” the statement said. “For the hospital, as well as the families, these past four years have been painful.”

Had the case gone to trial, the defense was expected to challenge the validity of Saldivar’s statements and the lab findings, while emphasizing how little direct evidence linked him to the specific victims. According to court records, no hospital employee saw him inject any of them. In only one case was there a witness, a nurse, who placed Saldivarin a victim’s room shortly before death.

Veterans of hospital “Angel of Death” investigations elsewhere say that such facts make these cases among the most difficult serial murders to prove. In contrast to shootings where it is obvious that the victim did not die of natural causes, there often is little reason to be suspicious of the death of sick, elderly hospital patients. What evidence there is often gets buried with the victims.

Members of the Glendale police task force have acknowledged that there was a lot of guesswork involved when they picked 20 bodies to exhume from among the more than 1,000 patients who died while Saldivar was on duty.

And Chief Siverling said his detectives may never have been able to make a case had Saldivar not used Pavulon and only injected another paralyzing drug, succinylcholine chloride, which degrades more rapidly in body tissue. Co-workers said they noticed vials of that drug in Saldivar’s locker, but lab tests failed to find any in exhumed bodies.

“To find the truth is difficult in a case of this complexity,” Siverling said.

The head of the police task force, Sgt. John McKillop, has said that Saldivar “may have done hundreds” of killings, which would place him high on any list of serial killers--lists already replete with hospital poisoners.

In such cases, there often is a gap between the murders proved in court and totals suggested by provocative confessions or statistical studies.

In 1987 and 1988, nursing aide Donald Harvey pleaded guilty to 37 murders in Ohio and Kentucky, but confessed to poisoning 58 people over a 16-year period while holding various hospital jobs.

More recently, Dr. Michael Swango pleaded guilty to three killings on Long Island and one in Ohio, and was believed by the FBI to have taken up to 60 lives on two continents.

Two years ago in Great Britain, Dr. Harold Shipman, a small-town physician known for visiting elderly patients in their homes, was convicted of injecting 15 women with fatal doses of heroin.

A later study concluded that he had 297 more patient deaths than similar practices over a 24-year period. McKillop said he and his detectives would have tied more killings to Saldivar if funds had been unlimited. The biggest frustration was leaving so many families uncertain whether their loved ones had died naturally, he said.

“The ultimate goal would be to just keep working it until you have all the answers. But you are doing a murder investigation and you’ve got to balance the desire to have all the answers with realistic goals,” McKillop said.

The realistic goal had been achieved with Tuesday’s murder conviction, he said, but “there are victims that are unspoken for.”

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SALDIVAR CASE TIMETABLE

Feb 16, 1998 Glendale Adventist Medical Center receives a phone tip that an unnamed respiratory care therapist “helped a patient die fast.” Hospital officials determine that the tipster is referring to Efren Saldivar, who had been investigated internally a year earlier after a coworker reported rumors he had a “magic syringe.”

March 2 Glendale police asked to investigate.

March 11 Saldivar voluntarily comes to police headquarters to answer questions and winds up confessing that he killed “40-something” patients by injecting paralyzing muscle relaxers into their intravenous lines. Saldivar, then 28, is arrested on the spot.

March 13 Saldivar is released after a prosecutor says authorities need independent evidence to corroborate his confession.

March 30 Glendale police disclose that they have formed a task force to investigate deaths at the hospital.

April 9-10 Saldivar appears on two television newsmagizines and declares, “I lied.” He says he concocted his “Angel of Death” story because he was pressured by police and was so depressed he wanted to die.

April 28, 1999 Police announce that after an exhaustive review of hospital records, they are ready to exhume 20 bodies of former Glendale Adventist patients.

May 19, 2000 With the investigation past the two-year mark, an attorney for Saldivar asks a Superior Court judge to compel police to release their evidence.

Jan. 9, 2001 Saldivar is rearrested while driving to a construction job in the San Fernando Valley and ordered held without bail.

Jan. 10 Authorities reveal that tests conducted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found Pavulon in tissue from at least six bodies, providing the basis for six murder counts that could result in the former respiratory therapist receiving the death penalty. Saldivar also is charged with possession of a sedative, Versed, found in his home.

Feb. 2 Saldivar pleads not guilty.

Oct. 17 A Los Angeles County grand jury indicts him on the six murder counts, one for possession of the Versed and a new count of attempted murder, for allegedly injecting a patient who survived.

Dec. 5 Saldivar, now 32, again pleads not guilty.

March 12 Saldivar pleads guilty before Judge Lance Ito to the six murder counts and one attempted murder count under a plea bargain sparing him the death penalty. He agrees to a sentence of life in prison without parole.

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Times staff writers Steve Berry, Richard Fausset and Kristina Sauerwein contributed to this story.