Serial Killer Documentary - William Davis： Killer Nurse

0:12 Even though the code blue had gone off, he's watching him die. We would show them that footage and many of them just broke down in tears. I'm telling you, I don't understand.

0:25 Why.

0:26 I don't know why.

0:42 My Lord, you just don't think about going to the hospital and being killed.

0:47 One of the things that's so scary about health care serial killers is they know ways to kill people.

0:55 You know, to do something like this one time is unthinkable, but to do it multiple times, you'd have to enjoy it.

1:06 We are together, and then he's gone. It's horrible. It's sad. It makes me want to cry. I am Martha K. Blanks. I go by K. I met him in a bar, but he owned it. He told me I just lit the room up when I walked in. Oh, honey, he was good looking. He was dark brown eyes and dark hair. He had a great head of hair, always did. In fact, there were women that told him, They'd like to run their hands through it. He said, I don't think my wife would like that. But what got him was the heart.

2:35 We were on a trip to New Orleans when he had the first heart attack. Eight months later, we were in Las Vegas. He had another heart attack. He just, I guess it just got worse and worse.

2:49 In early January 2017, James Blinks has a successful operation and is sent to recover on an ICU ward in Christus Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler, Texas.

3:01 He had a triple bypass. I was there the day of surgery, could not stay the night of surgery. but I saw him the next day, and he was doing well. There was a lady who called me every 30 minutes in the waiting room. She was a nurse, and she would give me his progress, and he was doing good, doing good, doing good, all the way through.

3:28 My name is Jeff Roberts.

3:31 At the time that the Will Davis case was ongoing, I was a detective at the Tyler Police Department. The most distinctive thing about, which at the time was Trinity Mother Frances, they've since changed their name to Christus, is that we have a very good and well-respected hospital district. Bad outcomes are very uncommon.

3:50 Jacob Putman, I'm the Smith County Criminal District Attorney. Christus Mother Frances Hospital is a large hospital. They care lots of patients. They had recently built a new heart hospital as a part of that. Heart patients who've had heart surgery almost always recover quickly. and actually go home within just a few days. So for any patients to have extraordinary bad outcomes is unusual and concerning to the staff.

4:16 It's not something that they're used to seeing.

4:24 I saw him the next day. They'd had him up walking. He was sitting in a chair. And when I walked in, he did this. to me, calling me over. And I walked over to him, and I leaned down, and I kissed him, you know, like that, because that's what he wanted. And I want to say this, because it's really important to me. The last time I kissed him, it was to be a peck. And when we connected, we did not disconnect. And he didn't, you know how you'll pull away or nothing. And later, I thought about it. God gave us that goodbye. He gave us that goodbye. He died that night. When he passed away, I was told that by myself at 2 o'clock in the morning. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. He was the love of my life. And you know what I thought of? I

5:36 could never hear him walk in the door and say, Mama, what are we going to eat? Or just whatever his habit was. And I would never, it was closure. I would never see him again. He was gone. He was doing well. I said, what happened? He was doing perfect. He was doing great. What happened? And she said, we don't know. Got the surgeon, got me on the phone, and he said, we don't know. Everybody was shocked. It had been six months. I had buried James, thinking he died of complications with his heart. And then I got a text message one day, and a very good friend called me, and she said, you need to watch this right now. And it was on the tube. I don't know what it was, but I tuned it in.

6:38 At the beginning of the investigation, Christos approached the Smith County District Attorney's Office and the Tyler Police Department with concerns that a nurse may have been involved in intentionally harming, causing harm to patients at one of their hospitals.

6:55 The news report over a year after James died is about an investigation into the unexplained deaths of patients recovering from heart surgery.

7:05 When I saw that news and they said, if you knew anybody that was in on the fifth floor, Tyler, Texas, you need to call us immediately. And I did. I told him my husband had been there and he had died. He said, your story is just like everybody else's of those people.

7:32 Exactly.

7:33 Exactly. My Lord, you just don't think about going to the hospital and being killed, your spouse being killed. You go there to heal.

7:51 William Davis is from Tyler, Texas. He grew up in a pretty close-knit family. He's the oldest of four boys. Seems to have a very loving mother. But nothing that was really, really stood out.

8:04 He was a football star in a very small town, meaning he would have been well-liked and well-known by both kids and parents. He came in second in his class as far as grades, so he was intelligent.

8:17 I think that Will Davis was a big fish in a small pond. And when you're talking about growing up, if you are that big fish in a small pond, it can feel very powerful. People do look up to you and they do notice you and they know who you are.

8:34 As a young man, everybody liked him, and he seemed to be a standout that was going places.

8:46 We have Will Davis, who's around 16, 17. He's a normal adolescent. And he is attracted to this 12- or 13-year-old girl. And I think when you look at the age difference and the maturity level, this is something that really would be shocking to most people.

9:02 A 16-year-old dating a 13-year-old is criminal in many jurisdictions. That is certainly giving us an element of perhaps a starting of criminal delinquent behavior, giving us an indication that law may not be as important as it is to other people.

9:20 I mean, it's really not an equal relationship by any stretch of the imagination in terms of their age, in terms of their maturity, in terms of what they're allowed to do, and all those things. And I think one of the things we start seeing is Will, you know, having a very strong need to control the people around him.

9:38 Her parents did not approve of that because he was too old. He continued to pursue that relationship even though he had been told to kind of move on. Became kind of obsessive about her and to the point of actually crashing his car into a tree in front of her house. That's when the police got involved, and he got some mental health attention at that point.

10:00 It did cause him some problems early on.

10:06 Coping skills, the ability to see problems, and your ability to have resilience. The question becomes our ability to deal with difficult situations. Does aggression come out? Does the ability to pick up yourself and move on from the problem, does that occur?

10:31 He becomes depressed. He seeks out some antidepressants. He goes to get some help. He's told he's depressed. Then he's told he has bipolar disorder and he's prescribed a couple of different medications. He doesn't really believe that fits him, but I think The big picture is that this is somebody who is not just struggling from an adjustment standpoint, but really struggling from a mental health standpoint and is trying to figure out a way to navigate that while he's in college.

11:01 Got married, ended up divorced, but then he got remarried and went back to school and got a nursing degree and.

11:10 Was kind of headed on the right trajectory after a few years.

11:14 By 2013, Davis is working at Christus Mother Frances Hospital.

11:18 Well, everybody's very prideful in what they do. Nurses take an oath, and they take their job very seriously. I have good friends that are nurses and will tell you how serious they take the ethics of their job and the responsibility of that job. Is there a more vulnerable position than being medically sedated, coming out of a surgery, and counting on care, which, thank the Lord, most of the time is exactly what we all receive.

11:45 Will Davis is somebody who is a smart guy. He's made it through nursing school, which is no easy feat. He's now ambitious to go further than that. He's getting his master's degree, which many people acknowledge. That's quite an accomplishment.

12:01 So as we progress in life, we gain more stressors. And the question becomes, how do you deal with those stressors? What is your response? We later see what those responses are.

12:29 William Davis is a trusted nurse at a well-respected hospital.

12:35 He'd been working at that hospital for three or four years. He was generally well-liked, very friendly. He worked primarily in the cardiac unit, but he also would float to other floors and help out, mostly intensive care units caring for very sick patients.

12:51 Davis is studying for a master's degree and is house hunting with his wife while she's expecting their second child.

12:58 At the same time, I think there are some indications that everything is not what it seems. So for example, he has a very, very difficult time managing money. And this seems to be a problem for him for many, many years. The way this couple seems to handle this initially is the wife kind of takes over the finances.

13:16 And when I talk about being in trouble financially, I'm not talking about missing a few payments. I'm talking about somebody who's in like $ 135, 000 worth of debt.

13:23 And that's hard to climb out of.

13:33 One of the most telling things is at one point he texts a colleague to ask if they have any anti-anxiety medication. And that tells me two different things. Number one is he's struggling and things are getting harder for him. But also what he says, which is, I need something before I get into trouble. And I think that is, you know, as somebody who's worked with many patients with anxiety or depression or whatever, I've never ever had anybody, no matter how anxious they are or depressed they are, say, I'm about to get into trouble.

14:20 It's been five months since the surprise death of James Blanks. Another patient is recovering from a successful operation, 74-year-old John Lafferty.

14:30 He had woken up.

14:32 He was verbal.

14:33 He was alert.

14:34 He seemed to be doing very, very well. There were every indication, every expectation that this was somebody who was going to have a smooth recovery.

14:43 He was retired, had a loving family, grown children, grandchildren, very well loved. He had had heart surgery and was on his road to recovery when he died. It was an unusual bad outcome. It was an unusual death, not one that they predicted.

15:06 So when Mr.

15:07 Lafferty died, it was puzzling to the doctors, and they wanted to try to figure out what the cause was. But at the time, really, they couldn't come up with any answers. They kind of had to shrug their shoulders and say it's undetermined.

15:27 68-year-old Ronald Clark is recovering from a successful operation.

15:32 Ronald Clark was a little bit different. He didn't have heart surgery. He had vascular surgery, which meaning not on the heart itself, but on the aorta as it goes down towards the legs. But similar in that he had successful surgery and he should have recovered very quickly.

15:49 The doctors were thrilled at the progress he was making. And yet 24 hours after he has his surgery, he's brain dead.

15:59 They did a review of the surgery and really at that point, they were not able to come up with any plausible explanation as to why he would have had a stroke and died.

16:09 Will also took some additional safeguards. So for example, he didn't kill people he was assigned.

16:14 To look after.

16:15 He would go and kill people who other people were assigned to look after. So I think that was for two reasons. One is he didn't want his patients to be in danger. Look, I'm a great nurse. Nobody's dying under my watch. But I think it was another way, I think, of evading attention or evading anybody questioning his ability to care for patients.

16:42 Christopher Greenaway, age 47, becomes the third unexpected death.

16:48 Christopher Greenaway was really exceptional in a lot of ways as a patient.

16:53 He was much younger. He had been a war veteran. He was actually a paramedic.

16:58 But in terms of heart patients who need heart surgery, he was incredibly healthy and had almost no risk factors associated with his surgery. So when he crashed and died, It was very shocking for the nurses and doctors because he was in such good health. The doctors actually were very frustrated because they didn't have an answer to give to the family. The hospital was definitely trying to figure out what was going on. Certainly three deaths in this close proximity, highly unusual. They did the things hospitals usually do, which is check their equipment to make sure there's no malfunctioning equipment either on the floor or in surgery, checking the medications that they're being given. but everything they would

17:43 check was working properly.

17:46 One of the things that's so scary about healthcare serial killers is they know ways to kill people, and they know ways to kill people in ways that won't be spotted very easily. But I think what kept him murdering, what turned him really into a serial killer was the thrill and the exhilaration and that sense of release and power and control that he got when he killed and killed again. And I think that probably for Will, I think he was surprised that he felt a sense of power, a sense of control, and also a sense of relief from this stress, a temporary kind of reprieve. And I think that surprised him, and it really set up a very dangerous situation for him down the road.

18:45 I think for Will it was easy.

18:46 I think he also enjoyed watching everyone respond to these rooms and try to figure out what was going on. I mean, there's a team of doctors and nurses trying to save these patients, trying to determine what happened, and he's the only one in the room that really knows what's going on. I think Will had to have enjoyed it, or he wouldn't have done it more than once. So to do many in kind of quick succession like this, there has to be something driving him to make him keep doing it.

19:22 This is when you have to go to another level. This is when you have to question everything that you're doing. For this hospital, for this facility, cameras are now installed. The question becomes, who was the last person to see that individual or interact with that individual before their death? If the alarms go off that this person is perhaps flatlining, who was the last person to be in that room?

19:51 Was that person doing something positive or negative to the individual? Was it done with malice?

20:02 Joseph Kalina, 58, is recovering from a successful operation.

20:07 So Joseph Kalina was an American truck driver.

20:10 Talking with his family, he loved his job, he loved his family, came out of surgery neurologically intact, had no issues or complications from the surgery and was put on the ICU wing there at the heart hospital for more monitoring.

20:27 From there, he was in the care of a nurse.

20:31 One of the things that happened in this case was that for lunch, the nurse asked Will, to watch his patient for him as he went to grab a quick lunch. And as he was coming back from lunch is when the monitor was going off. Joseph Kalina was crashing with this unexplained event. The nurse was actually in there responding as well while Will Davis was watching outside the room.

21:23 The CCTV showed that in this particular case, immediately within minutes after Will Davis leaving the room of Joseph Kalina, he crashes. The devastating part was the video also showed Will Davis staging himself.

21:39 Down the hall. There was a TV that he had.

21:43 Access to that would monitor and show the vitals for the patients on that wing, and he kept looking up at that, and then he would look down the hall, and then he would look up at the monitors, And here he was, just like an arsonist, watching his victim suffer.

22:00 You know, when you see the way he acts and the body language on the video, it's certainly hard to imagine somebody doing something like this on purpose to a patient. But certainly to commit a murder and to walk nonchalantly down the hall as if nothing had happened would take someone who is incredibly cold and unfeeling.

22:20 I think that it wasn't so much that Will Davis didn't care. But I think at this point in his life, that drive, that compulsion, that need to feel good took over everything else.

22:37 Will was initially interviewed about his interactions with that patient by hospital staff and gave a story that did not match the CCTV in the case.

22:46 That was obviously a huge red flag.

22:50 Will basically said he really didn't do anything. He turned off an alarm on one of the IV pumps, but they could tell from the instruments in the room that his arterial line had been accessed and touched. The IV pump and the arterial line are on different sides of the bed, so there'd be no reason to touch one when you're really saying you're touching the others. When Will lies about being in the room, that's not only unusual, that doesn't happen. So why would a nurse possibly lie about going into a patient's room? When that dawns on them, you then have to re-examine every patient, every bad outcome you've ever had. A nurse with malicious intent is never something that they check for. When they do and they

23:33 start connecting the dots, really it just opened up a Pandora's box of patients and what had happened to them. Right after they caught him lying, they sent him home and suspended him until they could figure it out.

23:48 Any hospital is going to have deaths, but you start to see perhaps a pattern of deaths occurring. You have it investigated, and then there's a question of foul play. Through investigation, through camera video, and others, that starts to point to one person. We must call on the police.

24:22 Will Davis has been suspended after CCTV captured him leaving the room of Joseph Kalina, a patient who crashed during recovery from successful surgery. The hospital now suspects he may be involved in other unexplained deaths too and have called the police.

24:39 One of the really impressive things that this hospital did was number one, I think they took the suspicions and concerns seriously from the very beginning. And the other thing is that the doctors got involved in this.

24:53 The hospital went through all their patients for the last couple years before Will was suspected and looked at those bad outcomes to see if they thought it fit the pattern of injury that Mr.

25:05 Kalina had.

25:06 They also set up a hotline for people to call if they thought their loved one might have been a victim of Will.

25:17 Only at this point, a year after her husband James' death, does K-Blinks learn there was a potential killer on his ward?

25:25 So the police and the media got it. What I think is he killed James, and then he got by with it, and then he went and killed one just real quick. And so when James was killed, there was no camera. The lawyer told me that my case or my story was, was exactly.

25:52 Like everybody else's.

25:54 There's really no crime I've ever handled quite like this. It's unique in many aspects, both in the number of victims, the kind of perpetrator that was committing the crimes, the motivation behind the crimes. All of those were unique and certainly a large case to kind of wrap your mind around.

26:12 The community was terrified.

26:17 So the idea that someone could intend harm to you in that setting was really terrifying and caused a lot of attention.

26:26 Investigators know Will lied about touching the arterial line of Joseph Kalina, so they investigate if the medical emergencies could have been caused by Will interfering with this equipment.

26:37 So early on, the suspicion was that air was being injected into the arterial line of patients as they were post-surgery.

26:47 So there's a.

26:47 Lot of reasons why that was very hard to detect. First is the arterial line is not a place where you typically inject anything. But if you inject air into it, that air will travel up the artery to the highest point in the body, which in a hospital bed is the brain. So as air travels up the arterial line into the brain, it then blocks blood from getting to the brain, which causes a stroke. And then after about six to 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, that air is then absorbed by the brain. So the air is a murder weapon that disappears all on its own.

27:25 Certainly, you look at the way of placing air in someone's tubing that's for an IV. There are no marks. There are no bruises. So this way leaves no clues.

27:37 You could get away with this.

27:49 Will Davis had reached out to us early in the investigation to see, ironically enough, to see if we had talked with his attorney.

27:56 It was a phone conversation.

27:58 I thought it was interesting in some of the early conversation that he would bring up things that we knew as investigators we were interested in the case, but he would bring up things like the art line or bad surgery outcomes. As soon as we would turn it to any of the patients in general, you would hear his voice choke up as he would get nervous. Detective Weaver at that time, as we were finishing up that interview, just flat out asked him about putting.

28:27 Air in the arterial lines of patients.

28:30 And he would only say, I won't answer that without my attorney, which was good enough for me to understand we were clearly in the right direction with our investigation.

28:42 The police wanted to make sure they went through everything and see If there were more, how many? We could really only go back about a year because that's how long the hospital keeps the detailed records that we would need to prove it. And as they went through, they found four that they were able to confirm because they had imaging, whether it be CTs or MRIs.

29:08 That would confirm the kind of injury.

29:10 And then they found a list of others that they suspected As they found more and more cases that met that pattern, it became more and more clear that Will Davis was a murderer and he'd murdered multiple people.

29:25 We need to prove this man's guilt or innocence, but we're going to follow the facts. He lived just outside of Tyler. He was married. They had two kids.

29:37 One had just been born, was a as a hard worker, you know, on face value, had everything going for him. But we saw things in the investigation that kind of pointed to some things that weren't necessarily forthcoming, an inappropriate relationship with a younger female, as well as some potential suicide attempts. just things that were red flags for us as investigators. As you start uncovering more evidence, living outside of his means appeared to be a.

30:06 Problem for sure.

30:08 It was new trucks, new house, new pool, living the American dream, albeit without maybe respect to how much money he had in the bank. And any time you add stress on top of any other mental incapacities or deficiencies going on, any kind of trigger can be an issue.

30:29 But he had a clear pattern of being impulsive with money decisions. That to us didn't seem related, but when we talked to psychologists, they said there's a pretty good connection there between sociopaths who know how to be controlled and deliberate in some areas of their life, but are very impulsive and unorganized in other areas of their lives.

30:49 A lot of his behavior, which to.

30:51 Us seemed normal, they said would be typical of a sociopath, that being very friendly, having a short attention span.

31:01 And that's what really unraveled some of just the psychology of Will Davis, maybe what was a motive. But I think at this, anyone on that investigative team would just remind you that sometimes there is just evil.

31:17 What we often find is I've done the first murder. I've not been caught. There was even a feeling of euphoria. There's a feeling of success that wrestling now has perhaps made that anxiety disappear for just a little bit of time. Maybe I liked the feeling of when that death occurred. Why not have the feeling again?

31:57 Will was absolutely aware of what he was getting away with because no one in the hospital is suspecting it might have been intentional. It was nearly impossible for them to connect the dots. The security footage was really the most useful piece of evidence.

32:13 It's very cold. It's very shocking.

32:20 Will Davis, actually, in a phone interview, told us he grabbed syringes just prior to walking into that room. He's in there for just about a minute and then walked out. Him being in the room, the video capturing that, and even his own admissions, placing himself in direct care with the patient at the time of the incident was very critical.

32:42 Error does not just happen in your brain. And so the method he chose to maim and murder his victims is ultimately what got him caught.

32:55 On April 10th, 2018, Will Davis is arrested for the murders of John Lafferty, Ronald Clark, and Christopher Greenaway. He's held in Smith County Jail on an $ 8.

33:09 75 million bond.

33:14 An $ 8. 75 million bond is something.

33:19 It tells us.

33:20 How serious this case is. It tells us how the criminal justice system believes that this individual is a threat to society. When we look at this case, it looks like a slam dunk for prosecution. You have an individual with cameras, showing that he is coming out of the room, he's in the room, just before death occurs. However, a defense attorney is going to go the route in this case to say, people are in a hospital, people are ill, people are recovering from major operations, they were probably going to die anyway, and Davis may get away with this crime.

34:09 Will Davis is in custody and awaiting trial. The COVID pandemic delays proceedings, and during 2020, Joseph Kalina passes away.

34:19 You know, I know for everyone when it comes to trial, No matter the case, there's always going to be nerves.

34:38 You never know what curveball is going to be thrown by the defense or anything else.

34:42 It is the job of the defense to slap down the argument that's presented by the prosecution. How are you able to link that to my client? If you can't, I must be found not guilty.

34:56 We prepared for this case for nine months, just preparing witnesses and going through evidence. And then we spent several months picking the jury and trying the case.

35:08 The interesting part in our investigation, even from early on, was that over a six-month period from June until January of 2018, Will Davis was the only nurse on duty at the time of each of the events.

35:25 The evidence was very, very clear.

35:27 The medical evidence backed up everything that the video backed up, and when pieced together, really painted the picture of the serial killer that was running the floors.

35:46 I expected them to deliberate a while, just because they had a whole lot of information to go over. We went over it in great detail for several weeks with them. And I think at the end of listening to all of the testimony, all of those doctors and nurses and experts, there really wasn't another conclusion they could come to.

36:10 Davis is found guilty of four counts of capital murder.

36:20 You now have this relief because you know justice has been served, you know he's been found guilty, and then they go into victim impact statements and now it's the humanization, it's the reality for people to hear precisely the effects of the devastation that Will Davis chose to bring upon his victims. I'll never forget, and I believe it was Ms.

36:44 Blanks giving her statement to the court.

36:53 So I stood there and looked right at him. He has black eyes, it seems like. Held his face kind of like something weird with his hands. But he is down, and when I would talk to him, he would go, and these tears would come down his face. And I said, I am Kay Blanks, James Blanks' wife, your first victim.

37:21 And I said, my husband did not deserve to die like that. And I said, I forgive you because God tells us to forgive. And I'm led by the Holy Spirit to tell you because we won't be forgiven if we don't forgive. And I do believe that. I said, but I feel just like everybody else feels about you. I told him straight to his face. I said, something's wrong.

37:50 With you, buddy.

37:52 And what was so impactful is so often you expect it to be vengeance and anger and all these things. And here was a woman offering forgiveness and really pointing Will Davis to the finality and the eternal decision of his actions. And I'll never forget that because it did point to the truth, the truth of the matter that there was a higher judge to answer to. and that he better be ready for that.

38:38 I want you to know that I am not a malicious man. I loved you. I loved the kids. During the summertime, I'm 17. That summer, we had a lot of finances. And of course, some of that's my fault. I'm blaming myself for that. I want you to have a nice house. I want you to have a nice pool. I want you to have a nice car. I want to have a nice truck and a nice car. And I was trying to work every day I could. I couldn't afford to be off. I couldn't afford to be called off. And I made sure that people stayed at ICU a little bit longer, just a little bit longer, so that our numbers would work out, so that we could take and so I could work. I want you to know that Kalina was not, Kalina was an accident.

39:22 Kalina was not on purpose or nothing like that. Nothing like that.

39:25 Okay, well, what about Greenaway?

39:28 What about the other two girls?

39:20 This behavior of, I've gone through the criminal justice system.

39:46 The criminal justice system has found me guilty and now I must rationalize why I did what I did is often the case with serial killers, those who are found guilty of very violent crimes. How do I find some sort of ability to find and let other people see me as a human being that has feelings? And this is often what occurs, is this rationalization of the behavior, especially to that of family members and those close to the individual.

40:19 Whenever you get back to that courtroom again, I want you to just see if you can at least take a stand. And take the time to apologize to these victims and their families. They deserve more sympathy. And in the end, you will reap what you sow. And that's telling you.

40:38 Unbelievable. That guy's a nut. Let me tell you what the DA told the jury. He said he did not kill those people for money. He said he didn't do it for that reason, and he spoke like that. He said he did it because he liked watching them die. I thought the gall of that, excuse me, to have the gall to saunter around like that, looking at his damage, taking people's lives.

41:13 It's almost like I've done these horrible things that I know people would hate me for, and yet I need to somehow soften it and justify it and rationalize it. And it's just, it always surprises me because you think once you cross this line, would you really care? I mean, you're not caring about human life. If you're murdering somebody, how is that going to result in more overtime?

41:44 When you look at this type of evil, the death penalty exists for cases like this.

41:54 I think there is certainly a great deal of narcissism in Will Davis. And I think that narcissism and that justification for putting his own needs and actions above other people is a seed that contributes later on to his lack of empathy.

42:15 I wake up many times and I will feel that he was, is in the bed or just got up, went to the bathroom and that feeling of so habitual and it's just like he's there. But we're together. We are together. And then he's gone. It's horrible. It's sad. It makes me want to cry.