Orville Lynn Majors

Orville Lynn Majors (April 24, 1961 – September 24, 2017) was a licensed practical nurse and serial killer who was convicted of murdering his patients in Clinton, Indiana. Though he was tried for only seven murders and convicted of six, he was believed to have caused additional deaths between 1993 and 1995, when he was employed by the hospital at which the deaths occurred and for which he was investigated. It was reported that he murdered patients whom he claimed were demanding, whiny, or disproportionately adding to his work load.

Early life and career Majors was born in Linton, Indiana, in 1961. He took care of his elderly grandmother as a teen, and that experience led him to go into nursing. He graduated from Nashville Memorial School of Practical Nursing in 1989 and took a job at Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, north of Terre Haute. He briefly took a higher-paying job in Tennessee but returned to in 1993.

Investigation Majors was one of the most popular nurses at , especially among elderly patients. He received glowing evaluations. After Majors started working at the facility, however, the rate skyrocketed to more than 100 per year, with nearly one out of every three patients admitted to the hospital dying.

Also, the circumstances of the deaths attracted skepticism even though most of them were elderly. Some died from an erratic heartbeat after respiratory arrest, the reverse of the normal pattern. Others died from conditions that they had not had when they were admitted or took a sharp downturn although they had otherwise been healthy.

Eventually, Majors's coworkers began noticing a correlation between the spike in deaths and when he was on duty and joked about when the next patient would die. However, in 1995, nursing supervisor Dawn Stirek was concerned enough to check the time cards to see who was on duty during the deaths. She discovered that Majors was on duty for 130 of the 147 deaths between 1993 and 1995. They also determined that a patient at was 42 times more likely to die when Majors was on duty.

Majors adamantly denied wrongdoing. While running a pet store in his hometown of Linton, he hired a lawyer and made the rounds of talk shows to proclaim his innocence.

Majors was convicted on October 17 for six murders; the jury deadlocked on a seventh because the victim had taken longer to die than the others. The hospital was subsequently fined $80,000 for negligence and code violations and was briefly forced to shut down for losing its accreditation. By 2009, it had been taken over by Union Hospital, based in Terre Haute, and renamed Union Hospital Clinton. He served his sentence at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, where he died of heart failure on September 24, 2017.