QUOTE OF THE DAY: " (Defence lawyer) O’Connor acknowledges that Hall has a lot of baggage in her past, but doesn’t see how any of it pertains to what happened at Hedrick Medical Center all those years ago. “So doing something in high school suggests that she’s the Angel of Death? Oh, my god,” he said. “This is a court of law. We’re talking about someone’s life, who could go to prison for life without parole.”
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "As Hall appealed her arson conviction, Hedrick Medical Center hired her in December 2001 as a respiratory therapist, not knowing of her criminal history.
Over the next six months, the hospital recorded 18 code blue emergencies, when in most years it usually had just one. Half of the patients died, and hospital staffers noticed that Hall was the common denominator. Not only was she in close proximity when patients coded, but she seemed to relish the excitement. “She liked code blues,” longtime nurse Aleta Boyd testified in a deposition for the civil cases."
STORY: "Trail of turmoil: In years since Missouri hospital deaths, suspect lived a troubled life," by Reporter Mike Hendricks, published by Kansascity.com, on July 3, 2022. (Mike Hendricks grew up in Omaha and joined The Star’s reporting staff in 1985 after stints with two Iowa newspapers. He is a member of the investigations and watchdog reporting team.)
GIST: "Doctors and nurses suspected for months that a killer prowled the halls of their small hospital in Chillicothe, Missouri. Patients were dying at an alarming rate at Hedrick Medical Center, and murder seemed the likely explanation.
Proof came when long-time Livingston County coroner Scott Lindley exhumed the body of Fern Franco for an autopsy one day after the 75-year-old grandmother was buried in Edgewood Cemetery.
Tests found residues of two drugs in her system that no doctor would have prescribed for Franco’s pneumonia. Together, the muscle relaxant succinylcholine and morphine would have made it even harder for her to get oxygen into her lungs.
Franco suffered “a ghastly death from suffocation while still maintaining full consciousness and awareness” that she was unable to breathe, according to investigators. Franco’s was the last of nine suspicious deaths at Hedrick that spring of 2002.
Jennifer Anne Hall, a young respiratory therapist from the Kansas City area, was the lone suspect from the beginning.
But prosecutors never believed they had sufficient evidence to bring charges against her. All they had tying her to the suspicious deaths was what appeared to be a damning correlation.
The hospital recorded at least 18 code blues, half of them fatal, in a six-month period when one a year had been the norm. That spike in deaths and non-fatal cardiac emergencies began shortly after Hall started work at the hospital in December 2001 and ended when she was put on leave after Franco’s death on May 18, 2002.
This May, two weeks shy of the 20th anniversary of Franco’s death, Lindley was elated when the now 42-year-old Hall was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in a case that many thought had gone cold. “In the last five or six years, they’ve really been working at it pretty hard,” Lindley said of law enforcement authorities he’d urged on. “I just needed a prosecutor who would go after it.”
A prosecutor and a veteran police detective have spent the last couple of years keenly studying Hall’s life since the deaths in Chillicothe.
The detective’s work and The Star’s own reporting found that Hall has led a tumultuous life, filled with troubled relationships and legal complaints.
Twice she was accused of trying to run an ex-brother-in-law off the highway, she allegedly stole the cremated remains of a man with whom she had a sexual relationship and on at least three occasions men have asked for court orders to keep her away from them.
“We know she’s victimized a number of people across the country,” said the chief investigator, Chillicothe police officer Brian Schmidt.
But why now do authorities believe they have the proof to put her away for life for allegedly murdering Fern Franco? What was the breakthrough evidence?
Prosecutor Adam Warren won’t say what he has against Hall that was not already public knowledge when he announced in 2012 that he was re-launching the investigation.
In an interview, neither would Schmidt elaborate beyond the facts laid out in the probable cause statement he submitted to support the murder charge.
That document provides no revelations, either. It contains no more information than was already public when Hall’s alleged connection to the deaths first made headlines more than a decade ago when, in a series of wrongful death lawsuits against the hospital, families of the deceased alleged that Hall killed their loved ones.
The victims ranged in age from 37-year-old David W. Harper of Ludlow, Missouri, to 89-year-old Charles E. O’Hara, a former town councilman who fought on Okinawa during World War II. David Harper of Ludlow, Missouri, died at Hedrick Medical Center in Chillicothe.
“The number of people who died under the circumstances in this case was, to me, remarkable for a small hospital,” said attorney Mike Manners, who fought on behalf of some of the families to see the civil suits proceed even as the criminal investigation had stalled.
The Missouri Supreme Court dismissed them all on the technicality that they weren’t filed in time. Hall and her lawyer have for years publicly denied any culpability or connection to the spike in deaths at Hedrick. “There clearly was a statistical anomaly, but that didn’t have anything to do with Jennifer,” defense attorney Matt O’Connor said recently.
“She didn’t have access to these drugs…It’s kind of like if she were charged with murder and shooting someone when the reality is she didn’t have a gun and didn’t have bullets. She didn’t have access to either.”
Moreover, no one saw her administer pharmaceuticals not authorized by a physician and no other physical evidence tying her to the deaths was revealed. So what has Schmidt turned up that others before him didn’t?
“I can’t comment on our cases,” Schmidt told The Star during a telephone interview, but he acknowledged that he has made a study of Hall since coming out of retirement in 2019, relying on his 30 years in law enforcement to look into the mysterious deaths at Hedrick and the background of the woman he believes is responsible.
To understand who she is and what she might be capable of, Schmidt has re-examined an arson case that preceded Hall’s time at Hedrick, in which she was accused of setting fire to a hospital in Harrisonville, Missouri.
He’s tried to learn what kind of trouble might have led to her being expelled from school when she was a teenager and has been tracking her activities and whereabouts as an adult since the events in Chillicothe.
Among her alleged victims, a rural Kansas man who experienced what Schmidt called a “match.com date from hell” when in 2017 the man connected with Hall. Her online dating handle was “littlewhiteninja.”
She sent him threatening messages when he ended their relationship, the man said, and tried to convince him that she was pregnant with twins and that he was the father.
“That wasn’t possible,” he told The Star on the condition that his name not be published.
More recently, a former school mate with whom she had a brief sexual relationship this year described Hall as “evil,” and has accused her of stealing his wife’s cremated remains, cowboy boots and engagement ring to punish him for kicking her out of his home in Key West, Florida.
“She isn’t of sound, sober mind & I believe she had planned to kill me,” Russ Saner wrote in a request for an injunction for protection against dating violence that he filed in March of this year with authorities in Monroe County, Florida.
Said Schmidt: “There’s more nightmare stories out there, I’m telling you.”
The Star’s own investigation found that in the years before and since Franco’s death, Hall has lived a life filled with drama.
She married and divorced at least twice, went bankrupt, started an online business selling respiratory supplies and was accused in court documents by ex-boyfriends, relatives and others of erratic, sometimes violent and manipulative behavior, mostly in the Kansas City area where she grew up and has lived most of her life.
“I AM IN FEAR OF MY LIFE,” a former brother-in-law wrote in all caps in a 2013 court filing asking a judge to impose a restraining order against Hall after she twice allegedly tried to harm him in traffic on Interstate 35 in Johnson County.
“She’s friggin’ nuts,” Robert Bell II told The Star. “Like you know there’s levels of crazy that you believe someone is and she’s above that. She is literally, like, psycho.”
O’Connor, the defense attorney, said prosecutors may try to bolster what has up to now been a circumstantial case against his client by trying to impugn her character with how she has lived the rest of her life.
That’s unfair, he said. “I think they’re grasping at straws, and I think the fact they introduce this kind of stuff, the more it shows they don’t really have anything,” he said. ”What’s relevant to this case? Should a person be tried on everything they’ve ever done? Or should they be tried on the facts in this case.”
EARLY TROUBLES Hall is the younger of Don and Debra Hall’s two children.
She grew up in Shawnee, on the Kansas side of the KC metro area. Reached by phone, her older brother said he has had no contact with his sister in recent years and declined comment.
Her parents, Don and Debra Hall, also declined to comment on the advice of their daughter’s attorney.
Jennifer Hall, who went by Jen or Jennie, was brought up middle class. Don installed fire alarms for a living. Debra was a dental receptionist. Their daughter attended public schools in the Shawnee Mission district until for some reason she quit attending Hocker Grove Middle School in eighth grade, three sources said.
Thereafter she was homeschooled through high school graduation with a curriculum provided, according to Schmidt, from an Illinois correspondence school with a fundamentalist Christian ideology.
Schmidt believes something happened that made it impossible for her to attend public high school, but hasn’t learned what. “All I know was that she was troubled,” said Saner, who now lives in Key West.
He knew her back then but doesn’t know why she left Hocker Grove.
Suzanne Hartford believes she knows. Her family and the Halls both attended a non-denominational church with a vibrant youth program.
That was where Suzanne Bell, now Suzanne Hartford, met Hall. Hartford would later become Hall’s sister-in-law. “She was weirdly manipulative, like if somebody was getting all the attention she would pretend to hurt her ankle so that one of the guys would carry her. Kind of crazy, like wanted-all-the-attention kind of crazy.”
Hartford said Hall once confided in her that she left Hocker Grove after setting a fire at school after learning that a classmate had been sexually assaulted.
“She told me that her friend was raped by a teacher, and that the school board didn’t do anything about it, so she tried to set the school on fire,” Hartford told The Star. “I don’t know if she got kicked out or if her parents just decided to homeschool.”
In response to an open records request, Shawnee police said they have no documents showing that there was a suspicious fire set at Hocker Grove around that time.
No news articles show up in The Star’s archives, either, and the school principal during those years, now retired, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Hocker Grove Middle School was the last public school Jennifer Hall attended while a child in Shawnee.
She left Hocker Grove while in eighth grade and was homeschooled through high school.
Hall was later convicted of arson for allegedly starting a fire at the hospital in Harrisonville, Missouri, where she worked before getting the job in Chillicothe.
She was 20 at the time. Prosecutors alleged she set the fire out of spite after learning in a meeting with hospital administrators that they had decided not to punish a co-worker she had accused of sexual harassment.
“She did not take it that well,” a person in that meeting told Schmidt when he interviewed her two years ago.
“She stood up, began screaming and cursing and stormed out of the room.”
Hall was convicted of starting that fire in the respiratory therapy office at Cass Medical Center in September 2001.
At sentencing, she admitted to starting the blaze, but later said she confessed only because her first lawyer in the case told her the judge might go easier on her if she admitted guilt.
That lawyer would later deny urging her to accept responsibility if she was truly innocent.
Her sentence was three years in prison.
Hedrick Medical Center in Chillicothe was the site of nine unusual patient deaths while Jennifer Hall worked as a respiratory therapist there from December 2001 to May 2002.
The 52-year-old man who she’d accused of sexual harassment died of a heart attack several days before the fire.
His ex-wife at the time found him dead and told The Star that she believes his asthma had something to do with it. Schmidt wonders if that’s all there was to it but said there is no way to learn whether foul play may have played a role.
“He was cremated,” Schmidt said.
SERIES OF DEATHS:
As Hall appealed her arson conviction, Hedrick Medical Center hired her in December 2001 as a respiratory therapist, not knowing of her criminal history.
Over the next six months, the hospital recorded 18 code blue emergencies, when in most years it usually had just one. Half of the patients died, and hospital staffers noticed that Hall was the common denominator. Not only was she in close proximity when patients coded, but she seemed to relish the excitement.
“She liked code blues,” longtime nurse Aleta Boyd testified in a deposition for the civil cases.
Coval Gann of Chillicothe worked for the Missouri Department of Conservation for 35 years
He was a patient at Hedrick Medical Center in Chillicothe when he died.
A doctor named Cal Greenlaw also suspected foul play when, on Feb. 18, 2002, a patient’s heart stopped for no reason and he struggled to revive her.
Her blood levels kept bottoming out as if she’d been injected with insulin, according to court documents.
A nurse told him about two other suspicious code blue incidents in which people died.
At a meeting with hospital administrators a couple of weeks later, Greenlaw said he believed “there was someone on staff at Hedrick who was attempting to kill and sometimes succeeding in killing patients.”
He later suggested that Hall was the killer, but hospital management took no steps to learn if it was true, according to court documents.
Finally, Boyd, the hospital risk manager, threatened to go to the news media if something wasn’t done to stop the dying.
Shortly afterwards, Fern Franco was dead and Hall was put on leave and never came back.
Lindley had the remains of Hedrick patient Fern Franco exhumed one day after her burial to perform an autopsy.
His tests found evidence of drugs no doctor would have prescribed to treat Franco for pneumonia.
Hall began serving her sentence on the arson charge later that year at the prison in Vandalia, where her parents never missed a weekend visit.
She got out a year later, in the summer of 2003, when a judge set aside the guilty verdict, ruling that Hall did not receive a proper defense at trial.
Her lawyer had not hired an expert who might have questioned the nature of the blaze that started in her office while she was supposedly out in the parking lot.
O’Connor, who her parents hired to replace the first lawyer, did find someone to take a look at the evidence and that expert testified that the fire was accidental, caused by a defective electrical cord.
A second jury found that evidence convincing and Hall was found not guilty. “It was not arson,” O’Connor said recently. “We blew holes in it. She was acquitted.”
After the verdict, Hall portrayed herself in news articles as the victim of a bungled prosecution.
“I’m an ex con, and I’ll never get away from that,” she told The Star in 2005. “I will always be the girl who went to prison.”
A judge overturned the guilty verdict after he ruled that Hall did not receive adequate defense during her trial.
O’Connor was hired by Jennifer’s parents to represent her in a second trial where she was acquitted. She said she felt guilty that her parents had taken out a second mortgage and spent more than $100,000 on legal bills to get her freed. And while she didn’t expect a full-blown apology from the Harrisonville hospital, she felt she deserved an acknowledgment from her former employers that she had been acquitted. “Yes, I think I would like that,” she said.
‘ALL KINDS OF CRAZINESS’
Two years after that article appeared, Hall began dating a co-worker at the Olathe office of a big national insurance company, where she was a customer service manager, according to Johnson County court records.
After five months, they moved in together.
Ten days after that, Hall sought an order of protection against the man because he had allegedly threatened to hurt her.
The judge dismissed the case within a few weeks for lack of evidence, after which the boyfriend filed for his own protection order, claiming that during the time Hall had a restraining order against him she continued to contact him by text, phone and email.
He said it made him feel “annoyed, and inconvenienced and alarmed,” according to court records.
His case was also dismissed for lacking a predominance of evidence to support it.
He did not respond to The Star’s requests for comment. In August 2009, Hall married a childhood friend who was quoted in that 2005 Star story about her arson acquittal.
Charles Scott Bell told the reporter who wrote that story that he’d kept in touch with Hall while she was in prison and that the incarceration had damaged her. “Before this all happened, she was so confident and outgoing,” Bell said then. “She thought she could do anything. That’s gone now.”
Their marriage did not last long.
Within a couple of years, Bell wanted out. The CEO of a private security company in Kansas City, Bell did not respond to requests for comment. But according to his sister, Bell had learned by then that his wife was not as vulnerable as she had once seemed. “She was always attention crazy, but nothing that drew a red flag where I’d be like she’s crazy, crazy, until she married my brother,” Suzanne Hartford said. “Then ensued all kinds of craziness.
She on several occasions threatened him with a knife and fired a gun in their house.”
He filed for divorce in June 2012, three months after allegations about his wife’s connections to the deaths in Hedrick first made the news in the St. Joseph News-Press.
A TV reporter showed up at the couple’s front door one day to ask him to comment on the allegations, and Charles Scott Bell shooed him away, according to Lindley, the county coroner.
When Bell asked Hall about what happened in Chillicothe, “she told him that she did it,” Hartford said.
Hall also admitted to Bell that she’d set the fire in Harrisonville, Hartford said.
“She confessed it all to him.” An individual with the same initials as Charles Scott Bell is listed as one of the state’s witnesses on the probable cause statement supporting Hall’s murder charge.
All 30 witnesses are identified only by their initials, the statement said, because they had “expressed fear for their lives and the safety of their families if Hall were to discover their names and personal information.”
Some may have had good reason to fear her.
After his brother’s divorce, Robert Bell II was driving one of the security company’s marked cars down I-35 when a van sped ahead of him and the driver jammed on the brakes, causing a collision. “So I get out of the car and walk up there to the passenger side to see what happened or who it was and it was her (Hall) and she was smiling as big as possible,” Robert Bell II said.
“But the problem was, she had already called into the police department to say that her ex-husband was trying to ram her.”
Robert Bell said he thinks Hall mistook him for his brother, her ex-husband.
Court records show that Hall did on the day of the crash file for a request for protection order against Charles Scott Bell alleging that he rear-ended her vehicle.
A month later, Robert Bell was granted a protective order against Hall when she once again attacked him on the highway in one of his brother’s marked security cars.
“She pulled next to me and tried to slam me into the concrete median,” he said. “I stopped on the side of the road, and she sideswiped me down the entire side of her car and pulled in front of me.” The cops came but made no arrest, he said.
Over the years, Hall has worked in a variety of health care jobs in the Kansas City area, records show.
She was married and divorced a second time to a man whose last name was Semaboye.
A photo from the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office shows Jennifer Hall after she was arrested at a hotel in Overland Park.
That was the last name she was using while working at a bariatric surgery clinic in Lenexa in 2019.
According to a filing in a recent criminal case against her, Hall/Semaboye illegally obtained from a pharmacy the antidepressant drug Silenor by calling in the prescription for herself by using the name and an ID number of a nurse practitioner who also worked at the clinic.
Lenexa police completed their investigation in 2019, but the Johnson County district attorney’s office held off filing identity theft charges until this spring so as not to interfere with the Chillicothe murder investigation.
SUFFERS SEIZURES A preliminary hearing in the murder case is set for Aug. 16. Hall will be in jail without chance of being released on bond until then, as she is considered a flight risk and a possible danger to witnesses in the case.
She recently was diagnosed with leukemia, O’Connor said, and has epilepsy from which she suffers seizures, if not medicated properly, he said.
Saner observed some of those seizures while she stayed at his house in Key West.
Around Christmas, he reconnected with her after many years when he came upon her on Facebook saying that her boyfriend at the time was abusing her physically
She stayed with Saner at his mother’s house during the holidays.
In January she booked a flight to Florida and moved in with him after he offered to protect her from further abuse. “She had an episode where I ended up calling the ambulance as she was having multiple seizures,” he said.
Their two months together were erratic. She tried to get him to invest in her online respiratory equipment business. When he declined she falsely accused him of hurting her, Saner said, and they each sought protection orders against each other.
Saner called Florida authorities and accused her of taking his wife’s ashes and other effects in the boxes of stuff she sent back to the Kansas City area.
Police in Northmoor, Missouri, however, found no trace of them in a storage locker she shared with the boyfriend who she told Saner had hit her.
That man declined comment when contacted by The Star.
O’Connor acknowledges that Hall has a lot of baggage in her past, but doesn’t see how any of it pertains to what happened at Hedrick Medical Center all those years ago. “So doing something in high school suggests that she’s the Angel of Death? Oh, my god,” he said. “This is a court of law. We’re talking about someone’s life, who could go to prison for life without parole.”
Fern Franco was buried in Edgewood Cemetery in Chillicothe, Missouri after her 2002 death.
She was being cared for at Hedrick Medical Center when she died and hers is one of nine suspicious deaths that police say occurred while Jennifer Hall worked there.
We’re also talking about a need for justice, say Fern Franco’s family and the families of the other victims.
They deserve to know what happened to their loved ones all those years ago, said Aprille Franco, who was 24 when her grandmother died.
Did Jennifer Anne Hall kill them or not? “My family and those other families that are impacted by what this woman has done just wants answers,” she wrote in an email. “Maybe they will get them at the trial — maybe not. “Closure is all we want for our grandma. And those other eight families deserve the closure that’s long overdue.”
MIKE HENDRICKS 816-234-4738 Mike Hendricks grew up in Omaha and joined The Star’s reporting staff in 1985 after stints with two Iowa newspapers. He is a member of the investigations and watchdog reporting team.
Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/article262196292.html#storylink=cpy
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
