Orville Lynn Majors

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.

[3] 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.

The year before his return to VCH, an average of around 26 patients died annually at the 56-bed hospital and the four-bed intensive care unit.

[7] Eventually, Majors's coworkers began noticing a correlation between the spike in deaths and when he was on duty and joked about when the next patient would die.

[7] The Indiana State Nursing Board suspended Majors's license for five years after it had determined he had exceeded his authority by giving emergency drugs and by working in an ICU without a doctor, and VCH fired him.

[3][7] Investigators then determined that when Majors was on duty, there was an average of one death every 23 hours, a pattern that held whether he worked on weekdays or weekends.

While running a pet store in his hometown of Linton, he hired a lawyer and made the rounds of talk shows to proclaim his innocence.

[7] The state police medical team noticed several patients' heart patterns widening around the time that Majors was on duty.

With that 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 that they died.

[7] He was sentenced to six consecutive terms of 60 years, the maximum possible penalty under Indiana law at the time, which virtually assured that he would die in prison.