Reta Phyllis Mays: The Murders at the Clarksburg Veterans Hospital
Background and Employment
Reta Phyllis Mays was an American nursing assistant who murdered seven elderly military veterans and attempted to murder an eighth patient at the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Her crimes occurred between July 2017 and June 2018, while she was assigned to overnight shifts on Ward 3A, a medical-surgical unit caring for veterans with serious health problems.
Mays was born on June 16, 1975, and lived in Harrison County, West Virginia. She had served in the West Virginia Army National Guard and was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait before working as a corrections officer. She began working at the Clarksburg VA hospital in 2015. Although her position allowed her to provide basic patient care, she was not a licensed nurse and was not authorized to administer medications, including insulin.
Method of Murder
Mays secretly injected patients with insulin that they did not medically require. Some of the victims were not diabetic, while others had Type 2 diabetes but did not need the amount or type of insulin administered to them. The unnecessary insulin caused their blood-glucose levels to fall to dangerously low levels, a condition known as severe hypoglycemia.
The resulting symptoms could resemble complications from the victims' existing illnesses. Patients became confused, unresponsive or critically unstable. Medical personnel often attempted to raise their blood sugar and stabilize them, but the repeated or excessive insulin exposure caused irreversible damage and death. Because the victims were elderly and already hospitalized, their sudden declines were not immediately recognized as deliberate poisonings.
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