Welcome to Origins with me, Cush Jumbo. The show with the biggest names in entertainment tell me the stories that made them who they are today. Origins is a conversation about my guests' early inspirations and growing up. Guests this season include Dame Anna Wynter, P Bobby Delevingne, Peter Capaldi, and Golda Rashavel, a. K. A. Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton. I only discovered my sexuality when I went to drama school. Join me every week to hear where it When we all began. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Origins with Kush Jumbo.

The Bench.

Campside Media.

If you worked at the VA hospital in Columbia, Missouri, in the early '90s, Mr. Joseph Louis Kerzieski was your boss. Everyone called him Mr. K. He was the hospital hospital director, which meant he ran the whole place. One might see him striding down the halls wearing a well-ironed pinstriped suit. Those who worked with him told us he had something of a reputation.

He was distant, authoritarian. Autocratic in his leadership style. Rigid.

He didn't tolerate nonsense.

Strongly directive.

Mr. Kerzieski was a ferocious autocrat, a bully guy.

I don't want to use derogatory words, But if you wanted to think about a commander in a military hospital in the 1940s.

A military commander isn't far off. During World War II, Mr. K was a seaman, first class in the Navy, in the Pacific Theater. After the war, he went to school for hospital administration. So he wasn't a medical professional by training. He was an administrator, and he had to treat the VA hospital like a business. Mr. K reported to the higher-ups in the government, and those higher-ups reported all the way up to the President of the United States. It was Mr. K's job to ensure stability and a positive image at all cost. It was a lot of pressure. So Mr. K ran a tight ship. Here's Lee Miller, a former head nurse, again.

He wanted things done the way he wanted them done. He didn't engage in informal conversations with people in the hallway. His office was It was remote in the hospital building. You didn't just walk in to see him.

But in early September 1992, the hospital epidemiologist, Gordon Christensen, needed to talk to Mr. K. Remember, Gordon had just run that study on the apparent cluster of deaths, and the initial results were shocking. They showed a link between one nurse, Richard Williams, and the increase in deaths on Ward 4 East. By this point, the nurse had been pulled off patient care and was doing a week of training the ICU. But if he was actually a murderer, the hospital needed to do something a lot more drastic than shuffle him to a different ward. It needed to prove it and stop him. So on September second, Gordon took the long walk into that remote part of the hospital where Mr. K kept his office. The young doctor sat down across from the hardened administrator and leveled with him.

I insisted that the nurse not be returned to patient care.

Here's a quick reminder that this is from an interview Gordon did with his daughter when he was sick at home, so it's not the cleanest recording.

And I insisted that he do something right away, report it to the FBI. Or the local police. And he refused to do that.

You heard that correctly. Gordon asked Mr. K to go to law enforcement, and Mr. K refused. But he assured the good doctor that he shouldn't panic that the situation was under control. The VA was doing a proper investigation. Mr. K told Gordon that he would alert the appropriate authorities within the VA system. Meanwhile, Gordon should do more studies.

So I was supposed to review stuff and be sure everything was on board. And there would be a decision over the weekend about what to do. We would have a plan. Everything would be all set up, and I would be out of it.

Gordon thought he had successfully handed off the whole situation to the hospital administration, and he felt at least somewhat assured. This was the federal government. The VA did have a lot of power and resources after all. Surely they could protect these patients. But Gordon had no clue that he'd already stepped into a trap, one where he would soon find himself facing a terrible choice. Either say nothing and risk more deaths or defy the VA and risk his career. His choice would haunt him for the rest of his life. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, you're listening to Witnessed: Night Shift. This is episode 3, The Man in the Doorway. I'm Jake Edelstein.

Welcome to Origins with me, Cush Jumbo. The show with the biggest names in entertainment tell me the stories that made them who they are today. Origins is a conversation about my guests' early inspirations and growing up. Guests this season include Dame Anna Winter, Polly Delevingne, Peter Capaldi, and Golda Rachevall, a. K. A. Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton. I only discovered my sexuality when I went to drama school. Join me every week to to hear where it all began. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Origins with Kush Jumbo.

The following interview is being videotaped at the Dade County Public Safety Department, Miami, Dade County, Florida.

Sir, would you identify yourself? My name is Ronald F. Carly III. In 1976, a man in Florida tells a cop he has a confession to make. Arriving in Miami, I proceeded to do certain things that I considered to be necessary in the crime that I planned to commit. I was looking for a hitchhiker, potential victim. But instead of becoming his victim, I became his confidante, one of the people closest to him, as he recounted and was tried for his horrific crimes. From Orbit Media and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to My Friend, the Serial Killer. Subscribe on Apple podcast to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcast. Let's rewind a bit. In the last episode, a veteran named Leo Yamri Died suddenly in the night on Ward 4 East. Right afterwards, the young resident, Dr. On Call, confronted Richard Williams. His name was Dr. Al Kalani, and he asked Nurse Williams, Why are you killing my patients? It was a hell of an accusation to voice in a hospital. And by the time the rumor reached Mr. K, he couldn't just brush it off. He had to do something about it.

He decided to appoint a small board to look into it. Dr. Jan Sweeni and nurse manager Lee Miller were on that board. But when they interviewed their key witness, Dr. Alcalani, he downplayed his comment. He claimed he'd been joking. Dr. Jan Sweeni and Lee Miller thought they'd be able to get some insight into these allegations, something to press the investigation forward. If it were a joke, their entire board had been convened for nothing. But they felt in the pit of their stomachs that Alcalani did actually mean what he'd said.

I believe, and this is just what I believe, it's not what I know, I believe he was absolutely serious. I believe that everybody who testified to our board of investigation thought something terrible was going on. There were statistical issues and suspicions and patterns, but I think everyone was really, really careful not to make allegations or assertions because the bottom line was there was no physical evidence.

Well, maybe not physical evidence, but now there was solid data. When Dr. Sweeni and Lee heard about it, they wanted to see it.

We asked for it in that we asked the chairman of our board to ask for it. He's the chair. We asked him to go to the administration and get the data, and he was told, You can't have it. And so he came back and reported to us that we can't share that information.

The administrator reported to Mr. K.

Jan and I were the clinical people, and we were the ones alarmed. And I think he was just doing what hospital administration wanted him to do. And I think his goal was to keep the investigation reined in.

Dr. Sweeney and Lee sense that the administration's agenda seemed to be out of step with theirs, but they truly believed that lives were at stake. So they asked to look into some of the other suspicious deaths.

Jan and I were concerned enough that we actually made a formal request to expand the scope of the investigation. The administrator representative went to Mr. Kerzajewski came back and said, The answer is no. He said, You can investigate Leo Yamri's death, and that's it.

The request was denied. Less than three weeks after Mr. K convened it, the board delivered their recommendations. They recommended that Mr. Williams's link to the increased deaths, quote, must be pursued rigorously. In the meantime, they recommended Richard Williams must be kept off patient care. In other words, keep the nurse away from patients until there's more information. Then, almost as quickly as it had been formed, the board was disbanded.

Ad hoc means you convene and then you disappear. I think we disappeared. We were off the radar screen and they were onto other things.

Was it a formality? Possibly so. I think the administrative side side of the house was concerned that it stay very limited.

It was very possibly limited by design. They weren't even putting the right person under the microscope.

Why would we put it on Dr. Al Kalani? We had a situation here that we surely could have dealt with in a more constructive way than calling this green intern in front of us to give testimony into a tape recorder with so-called swearing oath. Who are we? We're not a body with any standing in the law. None of us were trained to do this investigation. We're not forensic scientists, and we're not people from the criminal justice world. Why are we pretending that we can investigate this situation.

The biggest action to come out of the investigation was a slap on the wrist for Dr. Al Kalani. Mr. K directed the acting chief of medicine to give Dr. Al Kalani a talking to about how serious this was, to tell him that his comment had been inflammatory and inappropriate. Not only that, but his little joke had caused the hospital valuable money, time, and resources. Once the administration was confident that Dr. Alcalani understood the weight of his actions, they let him go back to work as usual. My co-reporter, Shoko, tried to reach the doctor, but when she called his office and explained her reason for calling, the receptionist said no and hung up. He didn't respond to our letter either. To the best of our knowledge, he has never spoken to the press about it. As for Williams, he was allowed to keep working. This seems absolutely bonkers to me. As Shoko and I listened to Dr. Sweeni and Lee Miller, we began to feel the frustration and confusion they must have felt. It must have been like watching a surfer try to drown someone in the ocean and the lifeguard on the beach saying to you, Don't go in the water.

Back off. After the board was dissolved, Jan Sweeni and Lee Miller had to go back to their jobs knowing that something terrible was happening at their hospital. Something He was doing terrible that they had no power to stop.

I know I had become incultured to the VA way. I had worked there six years. The VA is a huge bureaucracy, and there are ways to get things done in the VA hospital, and there are ways you'll be beating your head against the wall because it's not going to happen for you.

Lee had been at the VA for 12 years at that point. He would keep working there for 10 more. But the experience of being on the board had broken something in him.

I would just say that I was increasingly less trustful of hospital administration and less on board with the direction the hospital was going. Part of it that was in Journal for me that I thought, I don't really trust these people anymore. I'm just going to get through it and do my job and take care of my patients, but I don't really trust them.

Dr. Sweeni waited for the administration to contact them. An update maybe even a thank you note. But they heard nothing back.

We give our report and nothing seems to happen. We were like, Who's dealing with this issue other than taking the nurse off of clinical care?

Without any official information trickling down, Dr. Sweeni had to rely on the rumor mill to figure out what was going on, and what she rattled her.

There was a rumor that Mr. Kerzieski was told, Gee, Joe, you got a problem there. I sure hope you can solve that because you're close to retirement, and I'd hate to see you lose your retirement. So whatever you can figure out, Joe, just deal with it.

There was one more thing. According to a later government report, Mr. K did not notify local law enforcement about the unexplained deaths at the hospital. In fact, when the hospital's own chief of police asked questions about the situation, Mr. K demoted him. After Gordon met with Mr. K in early September, he felt like he'd done the right thing. He handed off his data and went to enjoy his Labor Day weekend at a Lake in central Missouri with his children. He expected the VA higher-ups to take one look at his data and spring into crisis mode. That they'd immediately move to protect patients and hold whoever was responsible to account. But that's not what happened.

What happened was it came back, nothing had been done.

Gordon's data wasn't treated like an emergency. It was treated more like a letter dropped in the suggestion box, a rather inconvenient letter.

They then told me that they had given this data that I had generated to a statistician for the VA who would take a look at and would pass judgment. And if the statistician said the data was good, then the VA would do the right thing. So that's what I was counting on.

People were dying. There wasn't time for any bureaucratic bullshit. Gordon called another emergency meeting with Mr. K and other top hospital staff.

So I told the hospital director, If he didn't address this, I would address it. And he became curious at this. So he stopped meeting with me. That was the last time I met with him.

You heard that right. Mr. K gave Gordon the silent treatment. He refused to speak to him unless it was through an intermediary, Earl Dick, the Chief of Staff. Maybe you remember Earl all the way from episode one? He's the one who entrusted Eddie to look into the 4E rumors while he was out of town. Well, Earl is back now. As a clinician and an administrator, he was in a unique position where he straddled both worlds. So in a situation like this, he became a double agent, going as far as having secret meetings with Gordon in a tunnel. Everyone No one at the VA knows about the tunnel that ran under the street between the VA hospital and the University hospital. Usually, it was used to transport rates and supplies from one place to another. It terrified me as a kid. Dr. Sweeney recalls It felt like a bunker.

It was concrete-lined and had been painted battleship gray and a shiny gray paint, like little dingy lights hanging down from the ceiling, and not necessarily a pleasant place to walk.

Dim, remote, a little creepy. It was the perfect place for Gordon and Earle to meet privately. It was their version of the parking garage in All the President's Men, where Woodward and Bernstein met with deep throat.

Earle and I would walk through this tunnel, and he would tell me what was going on.

Earle Dick would give Gordon the latest intel, namely that Mr. K was proceeding with his job as usual, like a pragmatic businessman a man who cares mostly about protecting himself. And get this.

Ruzieski was being... He felt pressure to put the nurse back to work on the ward because he needed the staffing.

Gordon was agaced. He couldn't possibly accept that. But he was also torn about going to the authorities himself without some support from his bosses.

I was hesitant to break ranks without giving the VA the opportunity to do the right thing.

There was just too much at stake for the hospital and for his career. It would be better for everyone if the VA side itself was the one that rang the emergency bell and called the cops. What in But the shoot from there was a cold war between Gordon and Mr. K, both of them standing their ground and trying to make the other one blink.

Kerseyski would threaten to return the nurse to patient care. I would threaten to go public. In the meantime, I was repeatedly being assured that people in the VA were looking at this and were trying to figure out what to do next, even though they hadn't called in the FBI.

Gordon felt like he was the only one who could see how bad this really was. This Cold War, he was fighting. He was fighting alone.

This is also while I was working full-time, teaching medical students, taking care of patients. I didn't get much sleep.

The stress, the the isolation, the sleeplessness, it all piled up on him. Gordon was about to give up or go public, which could destroy his career or possibly get him arrested. He knew that the investigative board had been convened. Dr. Earledick, the Chief of Staff, had even asked him to prepare a presentation. But Mr. K stepped in and left explicit instructions that Gordon was banned from presenting the data to the board. Dr. Dick received similar instructions operations. But then someone leaked his statistical analysis.

Someone, not me, and I don't know who, I still don't know who, but someone took the data that I had assembled and took it to Ken Jacob, who was our representative in the Missouri Senate. It was two people, and they complained that this was going on. And then Ken Jacob revealed it the FBI.

So the person who tipped off the FBI was ultimately this state legislator, Ken Jacob, and he'd been tipped off by two anonymous people who worked at the hospital. We really wanted to figure out who these two people were, and We tried. During our reporting, we reached out to 24 former VA nurses, but very few nurses wanted to talk to us about this, even three decades later. Gordon, for his part, suspected that the two whistleblowers must have been nurses Ward 4 East. Whoever they were, they took the decision he'd been agonizing over out of his hands. In some ways, this sounds like the ideal scenario for Gordon. His data was now with the FBI, pointing straight at the person he thought was the killer. He didn't have to defy his bosses to get it done. It just happened. But Gordon was too deeply involved to walk away unscathed. For the VA, all those slow burning embers of a rumor smoldering within the walls of the hospital were about to become flames bursting into public view. On September 25, 1992, a reporter named Rudy Keller was sitting in the newsroom of the Columbia Daily Tribune, the local newspaper.

He was just waiting for something to happen.

One of the jobs of the Assistant City Editor on a Friday evening is to put out... You're putting out the Saturday morning paper. The other people are gone. The reporters who work during the week are gone. And part of your job is to turn on the television, switch the channels, see what's on the news.

The man on the TV was the Columbia VA Spokes, Steven Gaither. He was holding a press conference.

And he gave the standard that they had developed that there was a spike in deaths that they had been reviewing them, but there was really no cause for concern. They were wrapping up this review.

A statement saying, Yes, there have been a series There's a mysterious deaths in our hospital, but we're looking into it. Nothing to see here, kids. You know, that's going to raise suspicions for any reporter. But it was especially true for Rudy because he actually received a tip about something very odd going on at the VA a few weeks prior. He hadn't been able to make any progress on it then, but now here was the VA spokesman saying everything was fine, which meant that everything was almost certainly not fine. Something wasn't adding up, so Rudy called the VA's spokesman.

I called Gaither. I got the statement that he had basically given to CAMIZ.

It was your standard bureaucratic press release. There was a problem. We made an adjustment. The problem is fixed now. No need to panic. But Rudy noticed something strange. The statement was dated to the first week in September, which meant that for three weeks, the VA had been sitting on this news.

So they had been prepared for up to three weeks for someone from the media to ask about this.

Rudy, though, wasn't going to wait any longer. On On September 26th, Rudy wrote his first article about the case. The headline was, VA investigating unusual deaths. According to his interview with Gaither, the hospital had not planned on making the investigation public. Gaither told Rudy that the VA would only have announced it, If we felt there was a real serious problem, we don't want to go out and say, Gee, we've got a big problem here. Whether the VA wanted to say it or not, to Rudy, it seemed like there definitely was a problem going on. If there was a spike in deaths and they'd taken a nurse off of patient care, that meant there was a nurse who the hospital worried was responsible for those deaths. Could it have been malpractice or could it have been murder? Whatever the case was, Rudy saw that there was this figure at the center of the story, so he decided that he needed to find this person and show them to the world. In his first article, Rudy named the suspect only as a staff member, one who had been reassigned for both their own protection and for the protection of the hospital.

All we knew was that the VA had had a spike in deaths, they said, that they had taken a staffer, a nurse, off of patient care.

The VA wanted to keep the name of the suspect hidden, but Rudy found out who it was pretty quickly. An anonymous source leaked the name. Richard Williams.

Once You have telephone books. They tell you people's addresses. He lived in a mobile home in Ashton, Missouri, which is about 15 miles south of Columbia. So I got a photographer and I said, We're going to go visit Richard Williams. We're going to go find out what he'll say to us. We talked about, Well, what are we going to do? What's the potential for his reaction? Well, Well, you're on someone's property. You got to leave if they tell you to leave, right? The photographer said, Try to get him as far out of his door as possible so I can get a picture as clear as possible. It's a very typical mobile home park, the gravel or crappy little roads that you pull in and you're right there. Not a whole lot of shade trees or anything like that.

Rudy approached the door while the photographer stayed back, ready to take a picture. Everything was going according to plan.

I knocked, he opened, I identified myself. This guy looks like he's pretty hairy. He looked very stressed, as you might expect.

Rudy got straight to the point.

Are you Richard Williams? Are you the Richard Williams who lives, who works at the VA hospital? Are you the Richard Williams who's been removed from patient care? And And by the third question, he's pointing and yelling at me to leave with the photographer who's standing down to the below.

Somehow, in the midst of all of this, Rudy was able to get a few clear answers. The man in the doorway confirmed he was indeed the Richard Williams, who worked at the VA hospital and who had been pulled off patient care.

But that was it. He wouldn't go beyond that.

If you read the newspaper the next day, September 29, 1992, you'd see Rudy describes Richard Williams as a 26-year-old Ashland resident who has been a registered nurse since March. It was the first time that Richard Williams was named in the press. Later, another article run with a tiny picture of Williams pointing at Rudy to get the hell off his property.

He was very angry at the tribune and at me and would never, ever agree to speak to us.

It's no surprise that William Scramble to clear his name. He gave an interview to the St. Louis Post dispatch saying he was innocent. He also spoke with Local News channel 8. I didn't become a nurse to mercy kill or to determine when someone would die. I just can't believe that people think that I am killing people. His explanation for the increase of deaths on his ward was that the patients there were sicker than most. As you have sicker, weaker patients, as you turn them from one side to another, a lot of times they die at that time. The tape is pretty garbled, but it's clear he was concerned about his reputation. I feel like my name has been drugged in the mud. I've been kicked. I'm down. I've been trampled on by everyone. Williams wasn't the only one whose job and reputation was at stake, not to mention facing legal trouble. The VA was also scrambling to do damage control. Before long, Rudy received a phone call from state legislator Ken Jacob. He wanted to set up a meeting with Rudy and two hospital employees from the VA.

These were women who worked with Gordon Christensen in the quality assurance office and had helped him gather the materials that he needed to do his analysis of the deaths. So they were very familiar with what they were not telling the public.

Gordon wasn't as alone as he thought. According to Rudy, the whistleblowers were from the QI Department. They'd likely been among the first people to notice the increase in deaths.

They were distressed. They thought there was going to be a cover up. They wanted me to know certain things about what had been discovered up to this point. And they were What do we do from here? Where do we take this from here? Who do we go to with this?

As if Rudy didn't already feel enough personal responsibility to cover the story. Boy, did this meeting with the whistleblowers seal the deal? He had been told that there might be as many as 50 suspicious deaths in the hospital.

I basically promised them that I was going to stick with this story until there was a resolution. In the In the next 14 days, I wrote 15 stories that took it from, We had this problem, but we got it solved, to, The FBI is here to investigate whether or not this nurse was responsible for the deaths of 50 people.

Rudy's articles were what broke the story wide open. He became the public watchdog for this case, the custodian of the story. Pretty much the entire town of Columbia read the paper, and suddenly the whole town knew about the deaths at the VA. Va.

The cat was out of the bag. Richard Williams knew that he was exposed.

If the Columbia VA wasn't already coming off as a pretty scary place for a patient to visit, now people knew the name of the alleged killer nurse roaming the halls. And that's not all. The public also knew the VA was in full denial mode. Jay Dix, the Chief County coroner, spoke to the press. He said he should be informed of a serious problem with the hospital if it existed. But the hospital had said, Nothing to see If they hadn't, he would have done an autopsy and might have found something that could change the course of the investigation. This was not a good look for the VA. Now picture a hardened administrator sitting in his office while all this dirty laundry blows out the window in the public view. Mr. K was not pleased. The VA administration released a notice that everyone was to come to the auditorium for a meeting on October seventh. Gordon arrived and took a seating the front row, right where Mr. K could see him from his vantage point on the stage.

The hospital director called a meeting of all the people in the hospital to tell them that they should not speak to the FBI about this.

Mr. K told the staff that there were severe laws prohibiting the disclosure of confidential quality improvement information. He promised to prosecute anyone who violated this dictum, a $5,000 fine for the first offense and $20,000 for the second. Meanwhile, in the back of the auditorium, an administrator was collecting names and donations for an ad in the local newspaper. They were raising money to publicly criticize Ken Jacob, the state legislator, for alerting the FBI. The ad accused Ken Jacob's public statement of being inconsiderate, irresponsible, self-serving, and a betrayal of his public commitment. At the bottom, it says, Ad paid for by the individuals listed here. There were over 200 signatures. I should say it was allegedly 200 signatures because my dad's name is on there, too. And there's no way in hell he'd willingly cosign anything like that, much less give them any money for the cause. And I know, I asked him. Gordon was appalled by the ad.

This is where you really learned what the term sycophant came from, because the hospital is full of sycophants who would go along with all this stuff just to curry favor with leadership.

The message to the staff was clear. No one was to say anything about the case. And if they did, there would be serious repercussions. For most people, the choice was obvious. Keep quiet and keep their jobs. But Gordon was too close to the case to just let it rest. Anyone close to him could see that. Like dad, for instance.

I think the difference between myself and Dr. Christensen was a degree of sensitivity and responsibility. Actually, some of the people that died were his patients. He really is a classical physician, responsible. He said to me these words one day, These people risked their lives to save America. And when they came to our hospital, they were killed. And so he felt the full weight of this.

To be clear, no one had proved a crime had been committed, even if Gordon believed that to be true. But he was certainly relieved the FBI was on their way. What he didn't know was that the FBI was not rushing to his aid. The bureau had their own mission, and it seemed their own idea of who they needed to protect. Next up on Witnessed Nightshift.

I was told I was a foolish young man for doing this. Even when I explained what was going on, I was told that I was a foolish young man.

I didn't even know what I was doing anymore. What am I doing as a reporter? I've got no proof that this guy killed anybody. They took soil around the bodies to see if there were poison stuff in there. They did an incredibly thorough job. He probably got paid a lot of money.

His phone was being tapped, he was being followed, and he wasn't sure what was going to happen to him.

Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of Witness, Nightshift, ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge podcast channel. Just click subscribe at the top of Witness show page on Apple Podcasts, or visit getthebing. Com to get access wherever you get your podcast. As a subscriber, you'll get Binge access to new stories on the first of every month. Check out the Binge channel page on Apple Podcasts or getthebinge. Com to learn more. Witnessed: Nightshift is a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment. The show was hosted by Jake Adelstein. It was written and reported by Jake Adelstein and me, Shoko Plambeke. Amy Plambeke is the producer. Elizabeth Van Brokelen is the managing producer. Michael Canyon-Mier is our story editor. Fact-checking by Aboukar Adan. Josh Dean is our executive producer. Sound design, mix, and original scoring by Erica Wong. Additional music from Mike Harmon and AP M. A special thanks to Eddie Edelstein and Benny Edelstein. Thanks also to our operations team, Doug Slawin, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mahra, Destiny Dingle, and David Eichler. Campside Media's producers are Josh Jean, Vanessa Gregoriades, Adam Hoff, and Matt Sher. If you enjoyed Witnessed: Nightshift, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcast.