Murder charges dropped against former VA nurse

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- A former Veterans Affairs hospital nurse who was accused of killing 10 patients in 1992 walked free Wednesday after prosecutors said the tests that led to charges against him were flawed.

Richard Williams, 37, was released from the county jail Wednesday morning after Boone County Prosecutor Kevin Crane asked that the charges be dismissed. Williams had been jailed since his arrest in July 2002. In a statement, Crane -- who had planned to seek the death penalty -- said problems with the test that uncovered traces of a muscle relaxant in the 10 patients forced him to drop the charges.

"Now, as it was between 1992 and 2002, adequate evidence to show these veterans did not die of natural causes is once again absent in this case," Crane's statement read.

Williams' attorney Don Catlett said the murder charges had been based on "junk science" pursued because of political and public pressure in the high-profile case.

Williams had pleaded innocent to the charges, which accused him of injecting the patients with the powerful drug succinylcholine, causing them to stop breathing. His trial was scheduled to begin in October.

Family reunion

Reunited at his attorney's office with his wife, Melissa, and 3-year-old son, Caleb, the St. Charles resident said his reaction to his release was disbelief.

"I got up this morning, was notified that they wanted me to come from my cell up to processing at the jail," Williams said Wednesday afternoon. "I was told 'Here are your clothes, get dressed, you're leaving.' I said 'OK, where am I going?' They said 'you're going home. The charges have been dropped.' I walked out."

Catlett said Williams planned to look for a job and "try to get on with his life." David Havrum, whose 66-year-old father, Elzie Havrum, was among the 10 patients who died, said Wednesday his family was "just totally shocked." He said Crane called earlier Wednesday to tell his family the charges were being dropped.

"He said he was sorry but he had no choice," Havrum said. "I thought they had something on Williams, and now they say they don't. It is bewildering."

Prosecutors said when filing the charges that a new kind of test found traces of the drug succinylcholine in the tissues of all 10 patients, who died from March through July 1992.

But in his statement Wednesday, Crane said Dr. Kevin Ballard, who performed the original tests, wrote to him this week to say he now believed "no definitive conclusions can be drawn" from the tests.

Traces of succinylcholine have been found in other tissue samples, so its presence in the samples from the VA patients doesn't prove anything, Crane said. It's possible the chemical can be introduced into tissue in the autopsy process, Ballard said in a letter to Crane.

Catlett said the retesting was prompted by a similar case in Florida, where a doctor's first-degree murder conviction in his wife's death was overturned when an appeals court tossed out evidence of succinylcholine found by the same private lab that conducted the tests in Williams' case. The Florida appeals court said the new lab procedure had not been verified by an outside expert.

In Williams' case, the FBI was unable to duplicate the results found by Ballard, of National Medical Services Laboratories near Philadelphia, Catlett said, and the lab's attempt to validate the original results also was unsuccessful.

"The (new) results they have basically are that succinylcholine occurs in at least small trace amounts in all tissue, and they can't link that to a cause of death in these individuals," Catlett said.

A spokesman for the Willow Grove, Pa.-based lab declined to discuss the specifics of Williams' case Wednesday but said the testing standards for succinylcholine have changed over the past year or so.

"It's a relatively new scientific phenomenon that has been determined that there is a naturally occurring amount of the substance" in deceased bodies, said lab spokesman John Murray. What is still scientifically unclear, he said, is what levels of the substance occur naturally and what levels would indicate that a dosage of the chemical had been administered to a person. "There is just not enough history on it."

Lab director Dr. Robert Middleberg is to appear Thursday at a Columbia news conference with Crane.

Catlett faulted the lab, politicians and others who kept pressing for criminal charges.

"A lot of people took some speculation and innuendo and kept pushing it and pushing it, (including) people at the federal congressional level," Catlett said. "There just became a lot of pressure pushing this prosecution forward, and unfortunately when that occurs, sometimes you have this result."

Sen. Kit Bond, who had pressed for a thorough investigation of the Williams case, declined to characterize Crane's decision to drop the charges.

"Nobody can force a prosecution," said Bond, a Republican. "All I asked is that they give this a thorough airing and take the appropriate steps. If Kevin Crane, a prosecutor, believes there is not adequate grounds, than I am certainly not going to question his prosecutorial judgement."

Altogether, 41 patients died in 1992 under Williams' care. While those deaths were deemed suspicious at the time, usable tissue samples from 1993 exhumations remained from just 10 bodies, authorities said. The 10 patients ranged in age from 58 to 85.

Williams left the VA hospital in early 1994, moved to the St. Louis area and left the nursing profession.

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Associated Press writer David A. Lieb contributed to this report.