PAINSTAKING INVESTIGATION PAYS OFF.

Byline: Helen Gao Staff Writer

GLENDALE - When suspicions emerged in 1998 that a hospital therapist killed dozens of patients with lethal drug injections, Sgt. John McKillop knew right away he had a career case on his hands, and a daunting one at that.

``The odds of getting a case like this is a million to one,'' said McKillop, a 20-year police veteran who at the time was heading up the Glendale Police Department's robbery and homicide division.

But McKillop and his team of investigators would live up to the challenge. They are credited with bringing to justice the self-proclaimed ``Angel of Death,'' Efren Saldivar, a former respiratory therapist who worked at the Glendale Adventist Hospital.

Saldivar was sentenced on April 17 to six consecutive life terms without parole for killing six elderly patients with drug injections.

Getting to that point was a monumental investigative task. Detectives had to overcome overwhelming odds and chart unknown territories.

Unlike other homicide cases, there was no immediate physical evidence or victims to support suspicions of foul play. But Saldivar had confessed to contributing to anywhere from 100 to 200 deaths.

``We had no smoking gun,'' said Mario Yagoda, a member of the investigative team. ``In (typical) murder cases, you have a gun and gunshot wounds.''

Capt. Gerald Stolze, who oversees the investigative services division, recalled how, in the beginning, he felt the case was a lost cause.

``When we got into this, we thought there was a snowball's chance of getting a filable case,'' he said.

But Glendale police pressed on. Stolze handpicked a team of a half-dozen seasoned investigators and put them on the case full time.

The team worked out of a house on the hospital campus to ensure easy access to patient files and the medical staff. The house eventually came to be known as ``the safe house.''

Sequestered from the rest of the world, it was there the team spent countless hours combing through more than 100,000 patient records and interviewing hundreds of hospital staffers.

They often worked graveyard shifts. Sometimes they slept at the house. McKillop drew charts and posted task lists on a board to keep the investigation on course.

``Through the whole case, it was frustrating. We couldn't discuss or share the case with other officers,'' he said. ``We were completely in seclusion.''

Slowly but surely investigators found that more than a thousand people had died during and around the time of Saldivar's shifts. In order to separate natural from suspicious deaths, they had to take a crash course in medical basics.

They learned how to read medical charts and vital signs so they could hold their own when questioning the medical staff.

``When they found something in the chart that didn't appear normal, they had to go to the medical staff and confront them about it,'' Stolze said.

It was in those medical charts that the dead found a voice. And they spoke loudly.

``In a sense these people did get the last word. They left a record in their charts,'' McKillop said. ``Really, we took a statement from the victims by way of reading their medical charts.''

Using a combination of medical knowledge and old-fashioned detective work, the team identified 175 suspicious deaths and further cut the list down to 20 for exhumation.

Saldivar had said he injected his patients with either succinylcholine chloride or Pavulon, which are normally used to paralyze a patient before the use of artificial breathing equipment.

Detecting those chemicals in the buried bodies of the victims would prove to be a major obstacle.

Succinylcholine chloride breaks down quickly into chemicals that are normally found in human tissue. As for Pavulon, there was no protocol for detecting it in bodies that have been buried and embalmed.

``The people who pioneered and researched the drugs were not available,'' McKillop said.

Glendale police had to seek out scientist Brian Andresen from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop a testing system for Pavulon.

Then they obtained court orders to conduct exhumations and participated in the autopsies - personally putting organs in jars, mixing the necessary chemicals to create preservatives and transporting tissue samples to laboratories for tests.

The work was traumatic, said Stolze, who arranged for a police psychologist to talk to the investigators.

``You are opening up caskets of buried people. They are all in different stage of decomposition,'' Stolze said.

But the work paid off.

Pavulon was ultimately detected in six of the exhumed bodies, laying the foundation for a solid criminal case against Saldivar.

Given the evidence against him, investigators wish the media would stop referring to him as ``the Angel of Death.''

Yagoda described death by Pavulon as torture.

``It's a slow death. The death takes time. It's similar to someone putting their hands on your neck and choking you,'' he said.

``There was no angel of death there.''

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Photo:

Glendale's ``Angel of Death'' investigating team, from left, Capt. Gerald Stolze, Investigator Will Currie, Investigator Mario Yagoda, Lt. Donald Shade, Sgt. John McKillop and Investigator Anthony Futia.

Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer