A jury sentenced an ex-Texas nurse to death this week for taking the lives of four patients by injecting air into their arteries following heart surgery.
“The Smith County jury deliberated about two hours before condemning William George Davis to death. The 37-year-old Hallsville man’s sentence will be automatically appealed,” the Associated Press (AP) reported Wednesday.
The sentence was handed down one week after the same jury found the man guilty of capital murder.
The AP article continued:
Jurors agreed with prosecutors that Davis killed four patients at a Tyler hospital in 2017 and 2018. John Lafferty, Ronald Clark, Christopher Greenway and Joseph Kalina suffered unexplained neurological problems and died while recovering from their heart surgeries at Christus Mother Frances Hospital.
During the trial’s sentencing phase, prosecutors played for the jury recordings of telephone calls Davis made from jail shortly after the Oct. 19 guilty verdict. In a call to his ex-wife, Davis — a nurse in the hospital’s cardiac intensive care unit — said he would find ways to prolong patients’ ICU stays so he could wore more overtime and make more money.
Prosecution experts said the four victims showed signs of air in their brains, causing irreversible damage. Following the fourth death, surveillance footage showed Davis was the last individual to see the victim before his condition deteriorated.
Video footage showed the nurse was in one patient’s room a few minutes before an alarm went off:
“During the punishment phase of the trial, a United States Secret Service special agent said Davis viewed an online article titled, ‘List of serial killers by number of victims,’ about a month before his arrest in 2018,” CBS 19 reported.
Agent John Day explained he analyzed a laptop that had a username connected to Davis, and the analysis found searches done on the computer and saved on its hard drive.
He said the user either began looking for “Mother Frances hospital” or searched “Mother Frances hospital investigating possible serial killer” in March 2018.
“Someone on the same laptop viewed the Wikipedia article with a list of serial killers that same day and looked at an article about serial killers on a cable news website, Day said,” according to the CBS report.