Dating & Relationship status

Majors appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court, which let the verdict stand in 2002. He served his sentence at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, where he died of heart failure on September 24, 2017 while arguing with correctional staff, Officer R. Houston.

Investigators subsequently determined that when Majors was on duty, there was an average of one death every 23 hours, or almost one death per day–a pattern that held when he worked on weekdays or weekends. When he was off duty, the death rate dropped to one every 23 days. They also determined that a patient at VCH was 42 times more likely to die when Majors was on duty.

The state police medical team noticed several patients’ heart patterns widening around the time Majors was on duty. They called in electrophysiologist Erik Prystowsky to look at the EKGs. He suspected that there were only three explanations for these patterns–a potassium overdose, a sudden heart attack, or a large clot in the lung. With this in mind, in September 1995, state officials began exhuming 15 patients who had been witnessed getting injections and had widening heart patterns around the time they died. None of the bodies had signs of a heart attack or clotting in the lung, which proved they had been murdered. After a former roommate recalled seeing potassium chloride and epinephrine vials in their house, police obtained a search warrant and discovered numerous vials that could be traced back to the hospital.

VCH, which had been renamed West Central Community Hospital after ousting Majors, was slapped with wrongful-death suits by the families of 80 patients who died at Majors’ hands. Most of them settled the suits and were compensated by a state patients’ fund. The hospital was subsequently fined $80,000 for negligence and code violations, and was briefly forced to shut down after losing its accreditation. By 2009, it had been taken over by Terre Haute based Union Hospital and renamed Union Hospital Clinton.

After a two-year investigation, Majors was arrested in December 1997 and charged with seven murders. As mentioned above, investigators believed he killed 100 to 130 people. However, prosecutors chose to focus on just seven to keep from overwhelming the jury. A total of 79 witnesses were called to the stand at his trial in 1999. Some of the witnesses testified that he hated elderly people, and that he believed that they “should be gassed.”

Eventually, Majors’ coworkers began noticing a correlation between the spike in deaths and when Majors was on duty, joking about when the next patient would die. However, in 1995, nursing supervisor Dawn Stirek was concerned enough to check the time cards to see who was on duty at the time of the deaths. She discovered that Majors was on duty for 130 of 147 deaths between 1993 and 1995. Alarmed, she alerted hospital officials, who called in the Indiana State Police. Majors was suspended pending investigation. The Indiana State Nursing Board suspended Majors’ license for five years after it determined he had exceeded his authority by giving emergency drugs and working in an ICU without a doctor, and VCH fired him.

Orville Lynn Majors (April 24, 1961 – September 24, 2017) was a licensed practical nurse and serial killer, who was convicted of murdering his patients in Clinton, Indiana. Though he was only tried for seven murders and convicted of six, he was believed to have committed as many as 130 between 1993 and 1995, the period of time for which he was employed by the hospital where the deaths occurred, and for which he was investigated. It was reported that he murdered patients who were demanding, whiny, or disproportionately added to his work load.

Majors grew up in Greenville, Kentucky in 1961. He took care of his elderly grandmother as a teen, and the experience led him to go into nursing. He graduated from Nashville Memorial School of Practical Nursing in 1989, and took a job at Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, north of Terre Haute. He briefly took a higher-paying job in Tennessee, but returned to VCH in 1993.