She was a United States Army West Virginia National Guard veteran who served from November 2000 to April 2001 and again from February 2003 to May 2004, when she deployed to Iraq and Kuwait with the 1092nd Engineer Battalion.
[7] Mays was a longtime member of Monroe Chapel United Methodist, a small church approximately twenty minutes outside Clarksburg in Lost Creek.
[8] In June 2015, Mays began working as a nursing assistant at the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Medical Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, with no certification or license to care for patients.
[2][9] Mays was assigned to work overnight shifts on Ward 3A of the hospital's medical surgical unit in July 2017, when elderly patients began suffering mysterious acute drops in their blood sugar level.
One patient, Archie Edgell, an 84-year-old Korean War veteran, initially suffered a drop in his blood sugar to 24 (a reading of less than 70 is low and can be harmful.
By then, investigators had built up a strong circumstantial case against Mays, including her internet search history of female serial killers; her Netflix viewing of the series Nurses Who Kill, one episode of which focused on insulin killings; and phone calls made by Mays to her husband, Gordon, who was serving time in jail for child pornography charges[4] in which she bemoaned having to sit with a patient that she wanted to "freaking strangle."
[12] During another call to her husband, Mays complained of soreness in her arms from having to do compressions on a patient who, she felt, had "no quality of life", adding that if the staff "would have just said DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) he would have went to sleep when his sugar dropped down to 30.
[7] Prosecutors stated that there were approximately twenty suspicious deaths while Mays worked at the hospital, but charges were brought only for the cases that were believed to have sufficient evidence.
[13] An interview with Mays after her guilty plea was included in a report, released after the sentencing by the Department of Veterans Affairs' Office of Inspector General, that detailed deficiencies at the hospital.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Kleeh had recommended that Mays be placed at Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Fort Worth, Texas, so that she could receive mental health treatment there; the BOP ultimately assigned her to Aliceville.