The Bleach Killer: The Kimberly Saenz Murders

0:00 In April of 2008, in a small dialysis clinic in Lufkin, Texas, paramedic started showing up almost every single day to the clinic. Patients in those chairs were dying, and nobody could figure out why. It would take two patients, both hooked to machines, both terrified, to finally see what the woman in scrubs was actually doing. [Music] If you've never seen a hemodialysis machine up close, here's the mental picture.

0:48 It's roughly the size of a tall office filing cabinet. It's got tubes and screens and bags of fluid, and it's basically doing the job that your kidneys can no longer do. Patients with in-stage renal disease come in three days a week, sit in a chair, and stay tethered to that machine for about four hours while their blood is cleaned and pumped back into their body. You can't get up and you can't walk away. You sit in that chair, and you trust the nurse that's standing over you. In Lufkin, Texas, in April of 2008, that trust got 11 people killed or seriously injured. The woman at the center of this story was Kimberly Clark Sines.

1:28 She was born Kimberly Clark Fowler in November of 1973 in Fall River, Massachusetts. And like 90% of the people we talk about on this podcast, her childhood was rough. She spent years inside a psychiatric hospital. By her own accounts, later in life, she described that hospital as a child's paradise because she got to play all day and nothing was expected of her. By the time she walked out of those doors at 13 years old, she had no formal schooling, no social skills, and no real understanding of how the outside world worked. Her family moved to a tiny community called Pollock, just outside Lufkin, in deep East Texas.

2:10 Pollock is the size of a postage stamp. We're talking about a place where everybody knows everybody's mama and everybody's mama's casserole recipe. Kim enrolled at Central, joined the cheerleading squad, and tried very hard to look like every other teenager in the room. And it worked for a little while. Then her junior year, she got pregnant. She dropped out, and the whole normal teenager facade came down with it. She got her GED enrolled at Angelina College and earned her vocational nursing license. On paper, that was a good ending to a hard story. In reality, nursing handed her something dangerous. She had direct access to controlled substances.

2:51 And she had a substance problem nobody was treating. By the time she was hired at Lufkin, Davida Clinic in August of 2007, she had already been fired from at least four other healthcare jobs. At Woodland Heights Hospital, administrators called her with stolen dimmerol, stashed in her handbag. She also tried to gain a mandatory drug screening. None of that came up in her Davida interview, which is a thread we're going to pull on in a minute. Her home life was falling apart at the same speed. Her marriage to Mark was loud. It was hostile and physically violent in both directions. In 2007, Lufkin police arrested her for public intoxication and criminal trespass after a fight with her husband.

3:34 He filed for divorce in June of that year and got an emergency protective order against her. They later tried to patch things up, but those cracks had already become canyons. Davida in 2007 was a juggernaut. They were buying up dialysis clinics across the country, growing fast, and the focus was on volume. Years later, Davida would settle a $350 million false claims act case over illegal kickbacks to doctors. They would also get hit with the $383 million jury verdict over wrongful deaths tied to a chemical product called "granue flow." The point is, this was a company moving very fast and not always looking very closely.

4:15 Kimberly Signs, with her four firings in her drug history, walked right into a job in a clinic where patients sat helpless and chairs for four hours at a stretch. At the clinic, Kim hated being downgraded from medication nurse to patient care technician. She complained openly. She picked out specific patients that she found annoying, the ones who needed extra help, and she talked about them with a coldness that made her other co-workers very uncomfortable. The clinic was understaffed and it was tense, and Kim was carrying around a tank of personal rage with nowhere safe to put it. Then in April of 2008, something started happening that nobody could explain.

4:56 Patients began crashing in their chairs, with heart-stopping mid-treatment and their blood pressures falling through the floor. In a clinic that had called 911 about twice in the previous 15 months, paramedics wrapped up 19 ambulance runs in a single month. Patient after patient was coding. On April 1st, Clara Strange went into cardiac arrest and died. The same day, Thelma Metcalf coded and died right there in the clinic. Kim performed CPR on Thelma so badly that a coworker had to physically push her away and take over. On April 16th, Gracella Castandiet lost consciousness mid-treatment. Garland Kelly crashed and died two days later in the hospital.

5:39 April 22nd, Core Bryant coded. She would die three months later from the damage done to her body that afternoon. Opal few died on the 26th. Marie Bradley, Deborah Oats, Marva Rohn, and Carolyn Reesinger all survived. But barely. Here's what Kim was actually doing. She was walking over to the maintenance closet, pouring concentrated household bleach into a small plastic container, setting that container on the floor next to a patient's chair, drawing up the bleach into a large syringe, and injecting it directly into the venous line of the dialysis circuit. She was pushing straight household bleach into a port that fed directly into a living human beings' bloodstream.

6:24 On the morning of April 28th, two patients sitting in that clinic saved every life they came after. Lerlene Hamilton was hooked up to her machine when she watched Kim go through the whole sequence with the bucket, the bleach, and the syringe. She watched Kim walk over to Carolyn Reesinger and push the syringe straight into her line. She watched Kim do it again to Marva Rohn, who was asleep in her chair. Hamilton sat there witnessing all of it and realized that Kim was scheduled to come work on her next. A second patient, Linda Hall, saw the same thing from a different angle. She watched Kim slip a syringe into her uniform pocket, dip into the bucket, and inject Marva Rohn's saline port without ever logging the action into the bedside computer.

7:09 The whole point was to leave no electronic trace. Both of those women told the nursing supervisor, Amy Clinton, within minutes, Clinton confronted Kim and ordered her off the floor. The clinic pulled the sharps containers, which is where you discard used syringes from near the two patients and tested leftover fluid in the discarded syringes using the same strips they would use to verify clean water lines and the bleach lit up positive. Lufkin police were on the scene within hours. Strangely, bleach disappears in human blood almost instantly. It reacts with everything, breaks down, and leaves no trace of itself behind. How do you prove that someone was poisoned with a substance that vanishes?

7:53 You look for what the bleach leaves in its wake. CDC and FDA toxicologists test preserved blood from Garland Kelly and Core Bryant for a compound called "three chlorotriocene". Active chlorine, the moment it hits proteins in your blood, permanently changes the structure of one specific amino acid, and that change stays put. Lufkin and Core Bryant had three chlorotriocene levels, three to four hundred times higher than anything a human body could ever produce naturally. The case was made. Investigators also pulled Kim's home computer. She'd been searching phrases like bleach poisoning symptoms and "can dialysis detect bleach on April 2nd?"

8:33 The day after the first two patients died, at a point when the clinic still believed those deaths were ordinary cardiac events. Just about those searches at a grand jury hearing, she said she was just a concerned employee trying to understand what was happening to her patients. She knew what nobody else knew yet. Her trial started in March of 2012. Her defense team tried to flip the whole story onto DeVita, arguing that the clinic's water system was contaminated, and the company was using Kim as escape goat. On April 2nd, 2012, four years to the day after Clara Strange and Thelma Metcalf died, the jury convicted Kimberley signs of "capital murder."

9:15 They spared her the death penalty. She is serving life without parole, one of only 28 women in Texas carrying that sentence at the time of her conviction. Two patients and two chairs decided not to look away. That is the whole reason this story ended when it did. Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, bingeable true crime stories. I'm Joe, I'm the host, and yeah, obviously I'm sick. I'm not going to try to sugarcoat that. I missed an episode last week because I physically could not do it.

9:56 I gave it a shot, but I just couldn't do it. Now I sound terrible, but I feel so much better. I'm going to make a go up it. With me, I know my body's history and how you hear me right now. It's going to last a little while. The next few episodes, hopefully not a few, but maybe the next couple, it's going to sound kind of like I sound right now. Prepare yourself for that. If you're a new listener to the podcast, welcome. It's comfortable, put your feet up because there are hundreds of back catalog episodes for you to go and listen to. If you like 10 Minute Murder, but you wish it was a little bit longer, longer episodes, more information, more details about specific things.

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