Milton Poultney, 75, male, was supposed to be one more Long Island patient on the mend when he entered Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip in mid-September 1987. He had been admitted for gallbladder surgery, and witnesses later testified that doctors also removed a tumor that turned out to be benign. In the days after the operation, family members were led to believe his recovery was going as expected, the kind of slow, cautious improvement that happens one monitored hour at a time.
Then, on September 16, 1987, the ordinary rhythm of recovery broke. Poultney suddenly went into cardiac arrest and died. In a hospital, deaths can arrive quietly and still feel explainable—especially in intensive and cardiac-care units where alarms and emergencies are part of the landscape. What made his death linger in the minds of those left behind was that it didn’t seem to fit the story they’d been told about his condition. He had looked like he was getting better, and then, without warning, he was gone.
As weeks passed, the sense of wrongness around his death found echoes in other rooms and other families. A pattern began to take shape at Good Samaritan: patients who had appeared to be stabilizing would abruptly crash—breathing failing, hearts stopping—often during the same stretch of months. The suspicions sharpened after one patient survived long enough to describe a “heavyset, bearded man in a white coat” tampering with an IV. A urine test from that surviving patient later came back positive for paralyzing drugs that had not been prescribed, a result that transformed vague dread into a concrete, chemical clue.
Investigators focused on a nurse on the unit, Richard Angelo of Lindenhurst, who had cultivated a reputation for racing toward emergencies. The theory, later supported by his own statements, was chilling in its simplicity: create the crisis, then arrive as the rescuer. In a taped confession described in accounts of the case, he portrayed the acts as a desperate attempt to look competent—wanting “to create a situation” where his intervention would make him appear to know what he was doing. Police surveillance and a search of his apartment reportedly uncovered vials of drugs used to paralyze patients, and he was arrested in November 1987.
Because hospital deaths are rarely straightforward crime scenes, proving what happened to each patient required work that felt closer to exhumation than investigation. Bodies were dug up, and toxicology tests were performed to look for the presence of Pavulon, a powerful muscle relaxant used in medical settings. Suffolk County’s chief medical examiner, Charles Hirsch, publicly identified Poultney as one of the exhumed patients in whom traces of that drug were found, noting that he had died after gallbladder surgery. Prosecutors described how some patients, including Poultney, appeared to have been recovering when they inexplicably succumbed. Even then, authorities emphasized that they could not rely on statements alone; the chemical evidence mattered, and the case had to be built victim by victim.
Angelo became the central suspect, and ultimately the defendant, in the narrative of what happened inside that West Islip hospital. The legal process unfolded in stages: initial charges tied to the survivor’s account and other incidents, then later indictments as medical findings accumulated. By late 1988, he was indicted on second-degree murder charges that included Poultney’s death among the counts. At trial in Suffolk County Court in 1989, prosecutors argued that the hospital’s victims had been improving before they slid into respiratory failure and died, framing the injections as depraved indifference. The defense raised mental-health arguments, but jurors ultimately convicted Angelo of second-degree murder for Poultney’s death, along with additional convictions tied to other patients and assaults.
In January 1990, a judge imposed a sentence that, when stacked across the convictions, amounted to more than six decades to life—while also acknowledging that under state law the maximum time he could actually serve was capped at 50 years to life. For Poultney’s family, the courtroom conclusions could never restore what was lost in those two days between surgery and death. But the verdict did name what had been done to him, and it placed responsibility on a single set of hands that, for a time, had moved freely through a place where people are supposed to be safest.
