The Bleach Killer: The Kimberly Saenz Murders

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In April of 2008, in a small dialysis clinic in Lufkin, Texas, paramedic started showing

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up almost every single day to the clinic.

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Patients in those chairs were dying, and nobody could figure out why.

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It would take two patients, both hooked to machines, both terrified, to finally see what

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the woman in scrubs was actually doing.

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[Music]

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If you've never seen a hemodialysis machine up close, here's the mental picture.

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It's roughly the size of a tall office filing cabinet.

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It's got tubes and screens and bags of fluid, and it's basically doing the job that your

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kidneys can no longer do.

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Patients with in-stage renal disease come in three days a week, sit in a chair, and stay

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tethered to that machine for about four hours while their blood is cleaned and pumped back

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into their body.

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You can't get up and you can't walk away.

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You sit in that chair, and you trust the nurse that's standing over you.

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In Lufkin, Texas, in April of 2008, that trust got 11 people killed or seriously injured.

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The woman at the center of this story was Kimberly Clark Sines.

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She was born Kimberly Clark Fowler in November of 1973 in Fall River, Massachusetts.

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And like 90% of the people we talk about on this podcast, her childhood was rough.

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She spent years inside a psychiatric hospital.

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By her own accounts, later in life, she described that hospital as a child's paradise because

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she got to play all day and nothing was expected of her.

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By the time she walked out of those doors at 13 years old, she had no formal schooling,

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no social skills, and no real understanding of how the outside world worked.

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Her family moved to a tiny community called Pollock, just outside Lufkin, in deep East

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Texas.

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Pollock is the size of a postage stamp.

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We're talking about a place where everybody knows everybody's mama and everybody's mama's

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casserole recipe.

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Kim enrolled at Central, joined the cheerleading squad, and tried very hard to look like every

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other teenager in the room.

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And it worked for a little while.

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Then her junior year, she got pregnant.

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She dropped out, and the whole normal teenager facade came down with it.

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She got her GED enrolled at Angelina College and earned her vocational nursing license.

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On paper, that was a good ending to a hard story.

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In reality, nursing handed her something dangerous.

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She had direct access to controlled substances.

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And she had a substance problem nobody was treating.

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By the time she was hired at Lufkin, Davida Clinic in August of 2007, she had already been

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fired from at least four other healthcare jobs.

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At Woodland Heights Hospital, administrators called her with stolen dimmerol, stashed in

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her handbag.

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She also tried to gain a mandatory drug screening.

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None of that came up in her Davida interview, which is a thread we're going to pull on in

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a minute.

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Her home life was falling apart at the same speed.

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Her marriage to Mark was loud.

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It was hostile and physically violent in both directions.

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In 2007, Lufkin police arrested her for public intoxication and criminal trespass after

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a fight with her husband.

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He filed for divorce in June of that year and got an emergency protective order against

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her.

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They later tried to patch things up, but those cracks had already become canyons.

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Davida in 2007 was a juggernaut.

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They were buying up dialysis clinics across the country, growing fast, and the focus was

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on volume.

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Years later, Davida would settle a $350 million false claims act case over illegal kickbacks

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to doctors.

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They would also get hit with the $383 million jury verdict over wrongful deaths tied to a

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chemical product called "granue flow."

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The point is, this was a company moving very fast and not always looking very closely.

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Kimberly Signs, with her four firings in her drug history, walked right into a job in

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a clinic where patients sat helpless and chairs for four hours at a stretch.

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At the clinic, Kim hated being downgraded from medication nurse to patient care technician.

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She complained openly.

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She picked out specific patients that she found annoying, the ones who needed extra help,

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and she talked about them with a coldness that made her other co-workers very uncomfortable.

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The clinic was understaffed and it was tense, and Kim was carrying around a tank of personal

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rage with nowhere safe to put it.

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Then in April of 2008, something started happening that nobody could explain.

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Patients began crashing in their chairs, with heart-stopping mid-treatment and their blood

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pressures falling through the floor.

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In a clinic that had called 911 about twice in the previous 15 months, paramedics wrapped

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up 19 ambulance runs in a single month.

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Patient after patient was coding.

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On April 1st, Clara Strange went into cardiac arrest and died.

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The same day, Thelma Metcalf coded and died right there in the clinic.

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Kim performed CPR on Thelma so badly that a coworker had to physically push her away

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and take over.

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On April 16th, Gracella Castandiet lost consciousness mid-treatment.

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Garland Kelly crashed and died two days later in the hospital.

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April 22nd, Core Bryant coded.

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She would die three months later from the damage done to her body that afternoon.

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Opal few died on the 26th.

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Marie Bradley, Deborah Oats, Marva Rohn, and Carolyn Reesinger all survived.

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But barely.

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Here's what Kim was actually doing.

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She was walking over to the maintenance closet, pouring concentrated household bleach into

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a small plastic container, setting that container on the floor next to a patient's chair, drawing

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up the bleach into a large syringe, and injecting it directly into the venous line of the dialysis

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circuit.

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She was pushing straight household bleach into a port that fed directly into a living human

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beings' bloodstream.

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On the morning of April 28th, two patients sitting in that clinic saved every life they came

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after.

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Lerlene Hamilton was hooked up to her machine when she watched Kim go through the whole sequence

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with the bucket, the bleach, and the syringe.

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She watched Kim walk over to Carolyn Reesinger and push the syringe straight into her line.

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She watched Kim do it again to Marva Rohn, who was asleep in her chair.

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Hamilton sat there witnessing all of it and realized that Kim was scheduled to come work

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on her next.

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A second patient, Linda Hall, saw the same thing from a different angle.

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She watched Kim slip a syringe into her uniform pocket, dip into the bucket, and inject Marva

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Rohn's saline port without ever logging the action into the bedside computer.

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The whole point was to leave no electronic trace.

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Both of those women told the nursing supervisor, Amy Clinton, within minutes, Clinton confronted

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Kim and ordered her off the floor.

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The clinic pulled the sharps containers, which is where you discard used syringes from near

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the two patients and tested leftover fluid in the discarded syringes using the same strips

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they would use to verify clean water lines and the bleach lit up positive.

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Lufkin police were on the scene within hours.

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Strangely, bleach disappears in human blood almost instantly.

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It reacts with everything, breaks down, and leaves no trace of itself behind.

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How do you prove that someone was poisoned with a substance that vanishes?

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You look for what the bleach leaves in its wake.

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CDC and FDA toxicologists test preserved blood from Garland Kelly and Core Bryant for a compound

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called "three chlorotriocene".

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Active chlorine, the moment it hits proteins in your blood, permanently changes the structure

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of one specific amino acid, and that change stays put.

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Lufkin and Core Bryant had three chlorotriocene levels, three to four hundred times higher

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than anything a human body could ever produce naturally.

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The case was made.

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Investigators also pulled Kim's home computer.

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She'd been searching phrases like bleach poisoning symptoms and "can dialysis detect bleach

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on April 2nd?"

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The day after the first two patients died, at a point when the clinic still believed those

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deaths were ordinary cardiac events.

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Just about those searches at a grand jury hearing, she said she was just a concerned employee trying

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to understand what was happening to her patients.

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She knew what nobody else knew yet.

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Her trial started in March of 2012.

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Her defense team tried to flip the whole story onto DeVita, arguing that the clinic's water

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system was contaminated, and the company was using Kim as escape goat.

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On April 2nd, 2012, four years to the day after Clara Strange and Thelma Metcalf died, the jury

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convicted Kimberley signs of "capital murder."

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They spared her the death penalty.

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She is serving life without parole, one of only 28 women in Texas carrying that sentence

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at the time of her conviction.

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Two patients and two chairs decided not to look away.

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That is the whole reason this story ended when it did.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, bingeable true crime stories.

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I'm Joe, I'm the host, and yeah, obviously I'm sick.

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I'm not going to try to sugarcoat that.

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I missed an episode last week because I physically could not do it.

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I gave it a shot, but I just couldn't do it.

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Now I sound terrible, but I feel so much better.

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I'm going to make a go up it.

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With me, I know my body's history and how you hear me right now.

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It's going to last a little while.

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The next few episodes, hopefully not a few, but maybe the next couple, it's going to sound

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kind of like I sound right now.

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Prepare yourself for that.

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There's another podcast that I do called True Crime Blueprint.

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It's available most places.

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This one is available.

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Let's go search that up or check the show notes of this episode for links.

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True Crime Blueprint.

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And that's going to do it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.

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See you next time.