Angel of Death (Podcast) 
Angel of Death
Ever since she was a little girl, Vickie Dawn Jackson wanted to be Florence Nightingale. As a nurse at her tiny hometown hospital in Nocona, she cared for her patients and won praise from her supervisors—until the day she snapped and started killing her friends and neighbors.
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Two days after the attack on Reid, law enforcement officers discovered a syringe in a garbage can at Vickie and Kirk’s home. Tests later proved that it contained traces of mivacurium chloride. When they interviewed Kirk, he said he had “no clue” how the syringe had gotten there. In a separate interview, Vickie said the same thing. With an earnest expression on her face, she insisted she was genuinely shocked that patients had been murdered. If there was foul play, she added helpfully, she could think of a number of staffers who might have been responsible, but for the time being she didn’t want to point fingers.
The next day, the hospital’s administrators fired both Vickie and Kirk. (Although no one believed Kirk had anything to do with the killings—as a nurse’s aide, he was not allowed to handle medication, and he had not been working when a couple of the murders had taken place—Norris said his termination was in the “best interest” of the hospital.) And it wasn’t long before the Dairy Queen was buzzing with the news that Vickie was under investigation for murder.
“You could have knocked us over with a feather,” said one Dairy Queen regular, retired Nocona rodeo cowboy and ranch hand Tom Hancock, who always wears spurs when he goes to the restaurant. “A lot of people came in and said she must have snapped, just like one of those women you see on TV who all of a sudden go from normal to flat-out crazy without ever taking the time to pause at peculiar. But I had trouble thinking that myself. I said to everyone, ‘Hold on, partners, the killer might still be out there.’ ”
Amazingly enough, Vickie didn’t go into hiding. She remained at her house on Henrietta Street, and she continued to show up at the Dairy Queen to order her taco basket. As she would walk to her back booth, she’d smile at the stunned diners just as she always had, telling anyone who asked that she had had nothing to do with the murders.
One afternoon, she even ran across Pat Williams, whom she had last seen at the hospital the night she killed his father. “How are you, Pat?” Vickie asked congenially. “It’s so, so good to see you.”
Williams was speechless. “I promise you, if a man who was suspected of murdering my daddy had come up and said hello, I’d have thrown him through a plate-glass window,” he told me. “But it was Vickie, looking all proper and whatnot. I went back out to my truck in the parking lot and called my wife and said, ‘Honey, good Lord Almighty, Vickie said hello. What do I do?’ ”
No one seemed more confused over the turn of events than Kirk. Although he admitted to his friends and to police investigators that Vickie had not been happy with the way their marriage had turned out, he said he could not imagine that she was so unhappy that she would want to kill people. (“A marriage can’t make a woman all that crazy, can it?” he asked his mother.) Eventually, however, he packed up and left town, telling Vickie he was having trouble sleeping. Apparently, he had been having nightmares about her stabbing him with a needle.
As soon as he was gone, Vickie returned with a friend to the Third Spur one night, wearing one of her short Western tops. This time around, some of the cowboys asked her to dance. Maybe they danced with her because the good-looking Lisa Pelkey was no longer there. (Pelkey had completely recovered from her attack and moved to the Northwest, where, she later told me, she had stopped drinking and begun attending church regularly—“My way of saying thank you to God for not letting me get murdered,” she said.) Or maybe they danced with Vickie because they someday wanted to be able to tell their grandchildren that they had two-stepped with a serial killer.
Regardless, none of it seemed to matter to her. “She smiled and smiled that night,” said her friend. “She really acted like she didn’t have a care in the world.”
Perhaps she was smiling because she really was innocent. Or perhaps she was smiling for a different reason altogether. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t being ignored or slighted. She was being noticed.
Before they could arrest Vickie for murder, police investigators had to be able to prove that patients had been killed. That meant they had to get a court order to exhume the bodies of those patients who had suffered respiratory arrests and then perform autopsies to determine if those bodies contained mivacurium chloride.
The exhumations did not begin until June 2001. By then, many of the families had already hired lawyers to sue the hospital and its doctors for negligence. One man who sued—Harry Don Reid, the son of Donnelly Reid—lived right across the street from Chance Dingler. The two nearly got in a fistfight after Harry Don shouted across the yard one day, “You let that crazy nurse run around in your hospital and you didn’t do a thing to stop her!”
Lydia Weatherread, the teenage girl who had been in the hospital with appendicitis, not only sued but also wrote a paper for her high school English class about her near-death experience. She later told me she was thinking about going to nursing school. “After what I’ve been through, I’ve decided we could use some better nurses,” she said.
Meanwhile, as the months passed, Vickie still acted as if she had done nothing wrong. She even went so far as to get a job as an LVN at a nursing home in Gainesville, just east of Nocona, telling the administrators, who obviously did not check references, that she loved working with older patients. But she was fired within a few weeks after the administrators suspected her of attempting to steal medication.
Finally, in July 2002, Vickie was arrested at a grocery store in Bowie, where she had gotten a job in the deli department fixing sandwiches. The shocked deli manager told a local newspaper, “They have the wrong person. She was delightful and loved telling funny stories.”
For reporters around the state, the story seemed too good to be true. Soon they were racing to Nocona, hoping to get Vickie to talk. But she refused all requests for interviews. At the Montague County jail, she spent her time reading issues of True Story and watching ER, and she also read the Nocona News’ coverage of her case, where she was regularly referred to as the “Angel of Death.”
She did become friends with a couple of female inmates, telling them that she was a loving nurse who would never hurt anyone. But according to an affidavit one of those inmates would later give to the district attorney, Vickie’s lawyer sent her a package filled with evidence that would be used at her trial. Included in the package were the autopsy photos that a medical examiner had taken of all the exhumed bodies. The inmate had said to Vickie, “How terrible it must be for the families of those who were killed.”
Vickie looked at her and suddenly let the other side of her personality come through. “Screw those families,” she said.
One year passed as the lawyers prepared for trial, and then another, and another—and then came the surprise plea. When reporters asked Vickie’s attorney, Bruce Martin, why she had pleaded no contest, he said that Vickie had told him it was important to her that a jury never find her guilty of murder. “She has never admitted guilt, and she was never convicted by a jury,” Martin said. “Those things meant something to her.”
It was a baffling statement, and it only set off another round of debate back at the Dairy Queen. If Vickie adamantly refused to admit that she was guilty of murder, why would she plead no contest to the murder charges and willingly accept a life sentence in prison? Had all her screws come loose? Was she so completely insane that she should be sent away to a mental institution instead of prison?
Apparently, no one brought up the possibility that Vickie had refused to plead guilty because she simply didn’t feel much guilt about what she had done.
During my first visit with Vickie, I did everything I could to get her to confess. Yet she kept telling me, over and over, that she was not a monster and that she felt sorry for all the families who had lost loved ones.
I visited her a second time, and I had her call me collect from jail on several occasions. She never changed her story. She also mailed me a number of letters politely reminding me that she hadn’t murdered anyone. At the end of each letter she asked me to pass on her best wishes to my family, and she always signed each letter, “Respectfully, Vickie Jackson.”
In April I went to see her for the last time. She had been transferred to a state prison outside Waco, and she came out in an all-white uniform. Her hair was neatly brushed, and she had some makeup on her face. For a few minutes, we caught up on her family. We talked about Curtis, who was still living in Nocona, doing part-time work, and we talked about Jennifer, who was joining the Navy.
We went over a few more details about what had taken place at Nocona General so many years ago. Vickie could sense that I didn’t believe one word she was telling me. But instead of having a dramatic confrontation where I called her a liar and a killer, I told her that her younger sister had sent me a letter. I read part of the letter out loud. “Vickie is a remarkable individual,” the letter began. “She shows compassion and concern for all types of people, with no regard to their background. She chose to begin her nursing career so that she could share that compassion and concern on a daily basis with people.”
There was another of those long silences. Just as she had at the county jail, Vickie stared off at a spot on the wall behind me. But there was one significant difference. For the first time since I had met her, Vickie blinked back tears. “I was a compassionate person,” she said, her voice so soft that I had to lean over the table to hear what she was saying. “I spent my whole life trying to be good. Did anyone in Nocona tell you that? That I did everything I could to be a good nurse and a good person?”
She was about to say more, but to my disappointment, she caught herself. I realized that was about as close to a confession as I would ever get: Vickie, for a few moments, talking about the girl she used to be.
We spoke for a few more minutes, and then a prison official told me it was time to leave. I stood up and wished Vickie luck. “Prison can be a lot rougher than a county jail,” I said.
“Well, real soon, they’re going to let me go outside with the other inmates to work in the fields and pick vegetables,” she replied. “And they have a nice medical infirmary here.”
“An infirmary?” I asked.
“A nice one,” she said, her face brightening. “Maybe someday they’ll let me work there.”
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