Science Vs - How a Nuclear Lab Helped Catch a Serial Killer

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

It’s the 1990s at a medical center in California, and patients are dying. At first, this doesn’t seem strange — it’s a hospital, and deaths happen. But then rumors start to circulate about a particular health care worker: Difficult or needy patients in his care are ending up dead. The cops get involved, but there’s a huge problem: There’s no hard evidence. Until the so-called “Lab of Last Resort” steps in. Crime Junkie host Ashley Flowers joins us as we speak to analytical chemist Armando Alcaraz, former Detective Sergeant John McKillop and Dr. Ian Musgrave.  Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsSerialKiller In this episode we cover:  (00:00) Deaths at a California Hospital (05:20) Meet Efren Saldivar (10:51) A Shocking Confession (15:40) Pavulon and Succinylcholine (21:00) Searching for Suspicious Cases (25:09) The Lab of Last Resort  (34:21) Testing the Bodies (39:30) The Story Ends  Credits: This episode was produced by Joel Werner and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, with help from Wendy Zukerman, along with Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Music written by So Wylie, Bobby Lord and Bumi Hidaka. Thanks to Roland Campos, Steve Wampler, Audrey Williams, the audiochuck team, Jasmine Kingston, Connor Sampson, Stupid Old Studios, and Penny Greenhalgh. Special thanks to the LA times staff whose very thorough reporting we used to research this episode.  Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, how a lab that designs nuclear weapons helped catch a serial killer. And if you're going to do true crime, you better bring in the true crime queen. Host of Crime Junkie, Ashley Flowers, welcome to Science Versus. Hello, I'm so excited to be here. So something that a lot of people might not know about you is that you graduated from biomedical science. That was your degree. It was.

And we are twinsies. We both have this degree. I thought I really wanted to be a doctor when I was young. And I was, I think, fortunate enough to have to work full time to put myself through school. And I worked at a hospital for all five years and went to school at night. And I got to work side by side with residents who you have to be before you're a doctor. And I was like, oh, that's not the life I want. Right. who you have to be before you're a doctor. And I was like, oh, that's not the life I want. So I made a bit of a pivot and I finished my degree with actually a focus in research.

And so what do you like about science? I like facts. And I think so much in life can be so subjective. And what I love about science is it feels like there are real answers and not just opinions. Like sometimes things get to be black and white and that's not very often do you get that. Yes. Yes. I think that's one of the reasons I love science too. It's a way to understand the world. If science is your side piece, I guess, your true love is really mysteries.

That I've heard you say that you are obsessed with solving mysteries. Obsessed. What is it about a mystery that just grabs you and you cannot let go? I think I'm just overall like a very curious person, the more that I've like really drilled into it. And I want to, I want the answers to everything. The universe, I want the answers to all the unsolved mysteries. Like, give them to me. Well, today we have a real mystery for you,

and it's got a whole bunch of science in it. So, should we jump in? Let's do it. It's two days after Christmas in 1996, and a woman named Salby Esatrian is rushed to Glendale Adventist Medical Center in California. She's 75 years old and is having trouble breathing. One hospital worker told the LA Times about her. He said, she's a sweet old lady. She got treatment at the hospital. And December 30th, she's breathing on her own. Things are looking pretty good for her

But then three and a half hours later Salby was dead That same day Eleonora Schlegel goes into Glendale Adventist. She has some chronic illnesses a nasty case of pneumonia On New Year's Eve her son Larry. he said in a documentary that she was sitting upright and breathing as best as she could. They apparently have this toast and say next year will be better.

Oh no. But on January 2nd, Larry sees a message on his answering machine and it's from the hospital. His mom had died. And they're just toasting the day before? Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

Similar situation happens again. Jose Alfaro, Sr. He was a father. He'd fought in World War Two. He arrives at Glendale with severe pneumonia and two days later is found dead. And at the time, these deaths are sad, of course, but they don't raise any eyebrows because these patients, they were sick, had chronic illnesses, you know, it's a hospital.

People die. And how close together are all three of these? Like, pretty close? Really close, within days of each other. Okay. A few months later, though, rumors have been circulating that the deaths of patients like these didn't happen just because they were sick and elderly,

but that these people were killed on purpose by someone who works at the hospital. The rumor is that someone is injecting something into their IV. Ashley, tell me what your face is doing right now. Well, I'm just... What do you mean, rumors? Like, I feel like this isn't something that should be a rumor

if people know that someone's walking around, like, killing people. Yeah. We're gonna get into what these rumors are. Who everyone is blaming. Okay. What on earth happened here and how the hell a lab that develops nuclear bombs got involved? Naturally. Naturally.

Are you in? I'm in. We're going to do this just after the break. As Canadian dairy farmers, we follow ProAction, Dairy Farmers of Canada's national quality assurance program with six modules. Modules like milk quality, that stands for high standards of milk production. Or food safety, producing milk that meets 42 requirements. And animal care, that means caring for every cow. ProAction sets standards of excellence.

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19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling Palm, call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Welcome back. We've just found out that patients at a hospital in California are dying under perhaps suspicious circumstances. Ashley Flowers, host of Crime Junkie, is here with us. Hey, Ashley. Hello. So it's now 1997.

Whispers are going around that one guy might be killing these patients and his name is Efren Saldivar. So we talked about him with science journalist Sarah Scholes who wrote a book about nuclear weapons and stumbled across this case. So Sarah told us that back in Vertigo Hills High School, Efren was a bit of an oddball. He worked at a grocery store, he played the oboe. He didn't have a ton of friends, but he was a pretty well-liked kid and was kind of like the leader of the misfits.

In the senior wills section of his high school yearbook at Vertigo Hills. He wrote, I, Efren, of great mind and hunk body, hereby will three quarters of Vertigo's female population my enduring love and passion. The right to preserve me in their hearts and souls for the rest of their lives and other times. Eternally, yours and mine, Efren Stud at Large. Literally Efren, no one asked. Like what? I mean, it's real oddball energy there.

Was he actually of hunk body? You know, it was the 80s. He was pretty nerdy. A hunk would not be. If I was making a film, a high school film, he would not be cast in the hunk category. It would more be in sort of the dweeby oddball category. I love it. Okay.

So, Efren makes it through senior year, but ultimately drops out of high school. So he's working at a grocery store and one day. His friend came in wearing a medical uniform. He had a friend who was working at a hospital and he, he just really liked this guy's uniform and he was like, I guess I'll do that. I guess I'll get a medical career. I like the clothing. Scrubs?

Yeah. Is he talking about scrubs? He liked the scrubs. Which might sound like a weird reason to go into the healthcare profession, but you know, yeah, 18. Cute fit. It's as good as any reason. I like cute fit.

I like it. It's pajamas. Like, I used to wear scrubs. They're pajamas. I think the person who came in also had a stethoscope, so that might be kind of cool as well. Just like radiating power, yeah, I get it. So Efren enrolls in a respiratory therapy program, and respiratory therapists help patients

who have trouble breathing. So they give patients drugs, oxygen, and manage ventilators, stuff like that. And so when Efren is just 19 years old, in 1989, he gets a job at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. I see where this is going. This is the place where the patients at the start of the episode died. So at Glendale Adventist, part of Efren's job was to take care of really sick elderly patients and Efren is job was to take care of really sick elderly patients. And Efren is put on the graveyard shift.

So he starts moonlighting and working at other jobs too, during the day, other hospitals. So Efren is working all these jobs. He's a bit overwhelmed. And at one point, he starts gaining some notoriety at the hospital. So here's Sarah, our journalist again. He had a reputation at work for having a magic syringe.

What did they mean by that? Not magic in the positive way, but magic in the deadly way. His patients died faster than other people's patients. That's not magic, that's murder. Right? Magic feels like a really weird word to describe it. And this is where from reporting about this hospital at the time, it seemed like the healthcare workers, particularly the respiratory therapists had this really, you could call it a dark

sense of humor. They just, they played practical jokes on each other. So having worked at a hospital, having worked with a ton of people in law enforcement, I have seen this in a place where you see a lot of death or there's like a lot of trauma, having that like very dark sense of humor tends to be, I've seen a way that a lot of people deal with it. So it's not even super surprising to me to like see that in the hospital setting. Yeah. But still.

And then sort of other things start happening that make it harder to pass off as a joke. So here's Sarah. Someone had seen him putting something in an IV line that they thought shouldn't be there. A co-worker also says he sees an empty syringe and a bunch of drugs in Efren's locker, drugs like morphine and this medication called succinylcholine which is going to become important later. Okay. So in April of 1997,

a coworker ends up reporting Efren to a supervisor. But the supervisor doesn't know about the drugs in the locker, In 1997, a coworker ends up reporting Efren to a supervisor. But the supervisor doesn't know about the drugs in the locker, so they really don't have that much to go on. It's just kind of rumour in a place where there's a lot of rumours and jokes going around. But still, they look into the hospital records to see if Efren's patients are dying more often than other patients. And?

Didn't find anything because his patients weren't actually dying at a higher rate than anyone else's? Oh. Yeah. So they didn't find anything unusual here. They let it go. Efren keeps working. And it's not until almost a year later, in February 1998, that the hospital receives another tip. [♪ music who says that there is a respiratory therapist who,

the quote is, helped a patient die fast. And is this like a euthanasia situation or what does that, like what do they mean? The guy on the phone ends up being a pretty dodgy guy with a criminal record and seems to be implying that if he gets an extra $50,000, he'll give more information. Wow. He's basically extorting the hospital. Yeah. And so this time, the hospital calls in the Glendale Police Department.

And by the way, we did reach out to the hospital to ask them about parts of this story. And let me guess they didn't want to talk? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they said. Let me finish that for you. Thank you. Yes. All questions should be directed at Glendale Police Department.

So enter Detective Sergeant John McKillop from the Glendale Police Department. He is put onto this case and John and his team start poking around and John told us that he is actually not buying this idea that Efren is a killer. I was a skeptic because it just seemed odd. The whole thing seemed odd. What was so odd about it? Well, I mean, to be honest, you're talking about someone trying to extort money

out of the hospital to give information versus a major serial killer. I just thought it was a bunch of bull, so to speak. How are you feeling at this point, Ash? What's your spidey senses telling you? I mean, I under I mean, I understand what he's saying. And it's funny, I feel like the way that I'm at least hearing this is that the hospital really brings in the police because of the extortion, not because of the threat of somebody actually killing their patients. Yeah, that's John's memory of it as well.

Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, John. So I understand why he would just kind of come in with that thought of like, well, this can't be true. It's just some guy, he wants $50,000 to out a serial killer. Like there's no way. I would probably think the same thing too. Yeah. So, but still to sort everything out on March 11th, 1998, John's partner, Detective William Curry calls Efren into the station just to ask him some

questions. But John actually had something else to do that day. Will was going to bring Efren into the interview and I'm like, I'm going to go play hockey. I went to my hockey game. You were so short, but like, this is silly. Yeah, exactly. I love it. Right.

It's like, no need. I've got hockey. You take care of this. But. It's like, no need. I've got hockey. You take care of this. But it turns out this was not silly. When the cops start questioning Efren, he confesses to killing dozens of patients. All they had to do was ask some follow-up questions and the dude just folds? Pretty quickly.

He says he killed 40 to 50 people. Oh! Yeah. Over, like, what span of time? It's pretty vague at this point. It's very... The cops just found it very strange, particularly given this attitude of, I'm gonna go play hockey, sure, bring him in. They want him to do a polygraph. The way that the cops remember it is just,

all of a sudden, he starts talking, and they were in the room going, what, what, oh, oh, oh, oh. Someone get a pen, like, write this down. Exactly, exactly. And so John is playing hockey. I mean, they literally pulled me off the hockey rink to tell me, hey, your partner's on the phone. There's something going on. You need to go. And when I picked up the phone, Will says, this guy's confessing he's rolling over.

You need to get in here right now. Now we're talking about murders. Oh my God. So not only did he say that he killed patients, but he also told the cops how he did it. Like sometimes he would kill them with these drugs. He said he either used a drug called Pavalon or one called succinylcholine.

Which is what they found in his locker. Wow. Exactly. Does he say why? At the time, he said that he did it to ease the suffering of these patients. But we had our homegirl over here who's, like, cheersing to a brand new year. Yes. Yes. It doesn't really make sense. He sort of fashions himself as a little bit of an angel of death type character in that room that he didn't like seeing the patients suffering, says things like that.

Okay. So we wanted to know a little bit more about what these drugs do in the body and why they're used by healthcare workers. So we talked about this with Dr Ian Musgrave and he's a molecular pharmacologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. He told us that pavillon and succinylcholine, they interfere with how a particular neurotransmitter works in our body and ultimately they can paralyze your muscles. They stop the nerve signaling so your muscles just stop working. Now you may be saying okay why would you want to paralyze the respiratory muscles? That is if you don't want to kill someone why are we using these drugs in hospitals? And well these drugs are sometimes given to patients before surgery and it helps

doctors to intubate them, you know put the tube down their throats, it can stop you from gagging. Or if you wake up during let's say surgery it would keep you from moving around so a scalpel doesn't slip. But because these drugs paralyze the muscles that allow you to breathe, if you're using them in a medical setting you have to give someone a breathing tube or a respirator, so you're giving them oxygen artificially. Of course, if you give a paralyzing dose of these drugs without putting in a breathing tube and without artificially respiring them,

guess what happens? Everything shuts down. They die. Oh. They suffocate because they can't breathe. What would it be like to die like that? Everything shuts down. They die. Oh. They suffocate because they can't breathe. What would it be like to die like that? Incredibly horrible.

You're paralysed and you can't move and you can't react and you're suffocating to death. If some of his victims weren't unconscious, they would have felt it. They would have definitely felt it. Oh. Just like silent suffering. Yeah, that's right. Because Ian, we talked about it and he said it would be almost like drowning because you're not anesthetized necessarily.

So these drugs don't conk you out or put you to sleep. So you just can't breathe. And you can't even like move or scream. Oh my gosh, I can't imagine. Awful, awful. Now it is worth saying that in Efren's confession, according to the cops, he said that he would only do this to patients who are unconscious.

I don't, like there's no way. All 40 of them? Yeah, I don't know how we can know that for sure, exactly. So the cops hold Efren Saldívar on suspicion of murder. But even though he'd given this detailed confession, admitted to killing dozens of people, in the US, that's not enough to go on, because of this rule that's called corpus delecti.

Yeah, so tell us about it. Body of the crime. Tell us what it is. So the corpus delecti, you can't convict someone just based on a confession. Their confession has to actually match some kind of physical evidence. Where basically, like, if you took the confession away, you have to still be able to prove that they did it by some other means. Whether that's physical evidence, circumstantial evidence, other witnesses. But you should not be able to convict someone just by them saying, I did this thing. Yeah.

And in this case, all they have is a confession. They don't have any physical evidence because these patients really just could have died because they were sick. Yeah. Okay. So John, the cops hold him for a couple of days while they're doing some detective work, but in 48 hours, which you're going to come up with. And so they have to let him go.

And when he gets out, Efren goes on national television and says that he lied about the confession. And Sarah, our journalist, told us that Efren basically says, I didn't do it. I was depressed and suicidal and thought this was a way out. And the detective pressured me. And so I don't do it. I was depressed and suicidal and thought this was a way out. And the detective pressured me and so I don't confess anymore. A way out of what?

A way out of life. He sort of gave this idea that he was really depressed and basically suicidal and thought that if he confessed to these killings, then maybe he would be given the death penalty and then that would be his way out. Okay. But then he changed his mind, he says. I guess so. I guess so. He also said at the time that he was taking Valium and other sedatives and barely remembered

what he said to the cops. And even a hospital spokesman around that time said, quote, we don't know if anything happened, end quote. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Did he get, you know, in a room and pressured? Like, that's an easy thing to say? Like, do you also say the thing that's been weighing on you, and then all of a sudden when, like, the gravity of what that means

and, like, what the consequences are, when the gravity of that sets in, the story changes? Like, oh, maybe I, oh, gosh, I didn't know what I was, like what the consequences are. When the gravity of that sets in, the story changes, like, oh, maybe I, oh gosh, I didn't know what I was like saying. Yeah. But meanwhile, the medical board responsible for respiratory therapists suspends Efren's license to practice, so he's no longer working at the hospital.

And the cops, cops like John, they're not totally buying that his confession was a lie because it was just so specific, the drugs he used, you know, exactly how he did it. It felt like a weird thing to just say. So the cops stay on the case and actually create a task force to find out what is going on here. And they start going through every patient that died under Efren's watch and they're looking for suspicious cases. And this is a huge task. It meant wading through more than a thousand complicated medical records. It was completely crazy. I mean, we're cops, we're not doctors. So we had to learn how

to read medical charts and do all that stuff, quickly trying to become experts at something that none of us had expertise in. But they talked to the doctors and they learn fast. And they're looking for patients who weren't given Pavalon or succinylcholine legitimately at the time of their death. So they didn't need it for surgery. They start looking for patients as well, who at the time of their death had this particular pattern in their breathing and heart rate moments before they died

that might suggest they were given Pavillon or succinylcholine. They're also on the hunt for situations like Salbeusartrians and the other patients we talked about at the start of the show where they're doing better and then suddenly they die for no clear reason. Mm-hmm, like Nosedive, yeah. And so after months of trawling through these records,

they come up with 20 people whose deaths at the hospital were highly suspicious. And so now the plan is to exhume the bodies from a cemetery and search for the drugs that Efren had said he used to kill the patients. And are they the kind of thing that would last for a while? Like in the system, like would you still see them? Ashley, that is the question because the cops start asking around and they

realize that we do not have a good test to find these drugs in this situation. Basically you can't pull out some easy peasy tests off our forensic science shelf that would detect what's expected to be pretty low levels of Pavillard or succinyl choline in a decomposing human body. So bottom line, even if they exhumed those bodies from those graveyards, there's no reliable test to find these drugs inside them. They've got nothing. So now what? The story can't end here, obviously.

Obviously. They get a tip that there is this place that just might be able to help them. It's a lab that some call the Lab of Last Resort. What a name. It's basic, it's where we're at in this story, right? Yeah, true. This lab is called the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It's this huge sprawling facility in California that was created in the early

days of the cold war and does some truly bonkers stuff. So they design nuclear warheads. They have one of the world's most powerful lasers. And they also have this forensic science center that can trace tiny amounts of chemicals. Why, what are they doing at this lab? So they use it to find chemical weapons, evidence of chemical weapons in an environment.

Oh. And also alleged murderers. And here's how John describes this slab. I don't know if you know about this place, but it's like, I mean, they weigh you when you go in to make sure your weight is consistent with what's on your ID and, you know, fingerprint you and it's like a high, really super high level, high security kind of village. After the break, we'll get inside that high security village. The lab of last resort.

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It's an Uber account that allows your teen to request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Add your teen to your Uber account today. Welcome back. Today on the show, I'm here with Ashley Flowers, host of Crime Junkie, and we are cracking the case of Efren Saldivar, a healthcare worker who's suspected of killing dozens of patients. Wide open. Let's do it. So we're now heading to the Forensic Science Centre at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

in California. The lab of last resort. And it's now up to some serious nerds to try to detect the tiny amounts of drugs in bodies that have been buried for years. Armando Alcaraz is an analytical chemist who works at Lawrence Livermore and he was on the team who had to now create this test. And when he heard about what he had to do, he was like, Oh my God, are we going to find this stuff?

And I was a bit skeptical. I thought it was still going to be enough contamination and at such low levels that we weren't going to be able to see it. And we would then have to sort of pull that needle, you know, out of a haystack. So here's what they have to do. Let me describe the needle and the haystack. So needle is the drugs. The haystack are the loads of other chemicals that would be in these decomposing bodies.

Armando told us that some of the patients were smokers. So tobacco would have been contaminating the tissue. So would any embalming fluid used in the burying process. Dirty water would have been seeping into the coffins by now, leaching in all of these chemicals from the soil surrounding it. And it meant that if you were to look in liquid in their bladder.

Yeah, at that point, you don't know whether it was actually real urine or whether water seepage had gotten into that coffin and there was moisture in it. And that's what you're analyzing. Oh, right. You don't even know if it's like body fluid or outside fluid or. Exactly. So they get to work and they quickly realized that one of the drugs that Efren had said he used to kill patients, succinylcholine, that is basically a lost cause. It's just too hard to identify it in a human body after all this time. And the reason is it breaks down real fast. And when it breaks down into the metabolites,

those metabolites can be found in the human body anyway. So how could you go into a court of law and say, well, here we found these metabolites. Well, the defense lawyers are going to go, well, and what does that mean? They're normally found in a human body anyway. But with Pavalon, there's no reason why a person should have that drug in their system unless they had a procedure or somebody injected them with it. So they zoom in and try to create a test to identify Pavillon. And because they don't want to be doing this work in human bodies, they start working with something that's pretty close to a human body. Pick pigs. Do it. Yes. Yes. So Armando and his colleague get pig livers and they add a tiny bit of pavillon.

Spike it, you know, put the chemical in it, and then just allow it to putrefy. And then you take it out and homogenize it. You basically put it in a blender and make milkshake out of it. Your face in this moment. I know. It's like the milkshake pig liver. Yeah, you can really feel it in your throat, can't you? Mm-hmm. Things are about to get a little bit grosser. So because they would take this pig liver pavillon milkshake,

and in some cases, let it sit and decay for months, making it more like what these bodies that have been decaying would be like. At this point, Armando and particularly his boss, Brian Andresen, are up to their elbows in decomposing pig livers. What on the street is that the lab did smell kind of gross. What did it smell like? There's these two notorious chemicals, putrescine and cadaverine.

So just the names themselves kind of give you an indication of what it smells like. Cadaverine? Is that what you said? Cadaverine and putrescine. It had to have smelled so awful. I just went into my first morgue for the first time recently, and there weren't even like, that was bad. I have no clue what this place would smell like. So decomposing bodies, whether it's pigs or humans or whatever, they emit these chemicals. And the two that he talked about,

cadaverine and putrescine, they give off that particular smell of death, that smell that you described. And here's how Armando described it. It's everything awful you could think of that's rotting. That's what it smells like. So I have to tell you this story because I spoke to Brian and we would be working late at night, you know, trying to get these samples through and he would be, you know, blending these tissues up with the blender. And even though we were doing all this in the chemical hoods, you could still smell that stuff.

And it would penetrate your clothes. It would get into your clothes. And so it would already be maybe 930 at night. It was late. And he said, I'm going to go. And I'd leave too. He'd go to the grocery store to go buy some stuff to eat. And so he would be standing in line. and people would start to just move away from him

because he had sort of was, you know, that smell of death was just in his clothes and in his hair and everything. It stays on you. I've talked to detectives who have said that there are scenes that they come home from and they have to just like burn their clothes or throw away their clothes because no amount of washing will get it out. There is just like a level that is beyond anything I think most people know. Yeah, bad. GIGI Well, so while covered with this smell of death, they take the, we're going to go back to the decaying pig milkshakes that have been spiked with Pavillon, and they pass them through this particular contraption that's called a solid phase extraction polymer.

It looks a bit like a plastic syringe and it has a kind of filter in it, or what's called a cartridge. And inside it, they're basically trying to separate Pavillon from all the other crap that is in these tissue samples. But what you have to know is that there's different cartridges out there that are used to isolate different chemicals. I had never thought about how one would isolate chemicals

from a human body. Not what I've spent my brain power on. No. And so basically they're pushing all tiny bits of samples through these little syringes. And what the game is to find the exact right cartridge that's gonna trap Pavillon, but leave out everything else.

Everything else, or as much as possible of everything else. And so Armando's colleague has been working on finding the right cartridge. Armando's focusing on another piece of this puzzle. It's really tough. Just passing this milkshake through these filters could take days, depending on how decayed the tissue is or how much mucus is in it.

May turns into June. They're pulling 16-hour days. It's just late night after late night. They had that task force that was just sitting there waiting for the results so they could move forward. So that was putting a lot of pressure on us and that's why we were working late. They're not finding what they need. It's depressing. Nothing is working. No, but what the heck's going on? And so the instrument would start leaking on me,

the solvents, and I'd be frustrated and just like, oh, pulling my hair out. But then one day, Brian is testing this cartridge that was designed to detect the residue of chemical weapons. And from across the room, Armando hears his colleague saying something. He goes, I think we're there. It was solid. Actually, what the cartridge did was it acted like a magnet where it would just collect the drug

or things similar to the drug and sort of it gripped onto it. And then it allowed us to then wash off all of like the tobacco products and other biomaterials that were in the tissue, but the drugs stayed attached. Wow. But yeah, that was amazing. That was a magic cartridge. Holy crap. That is incredible. Isn't it? They found the magic cartridge.

So Armando would now extract all the chemicals in the cartridge and then using a bunch of tools like mass spectrometry. Oh my God. This is why we call it mass specs, because there's so many R's in that word. Using tools like mass spectrometry, which separates chemicals based on their weight, and then try to identify Pavalon. In that sample, and here Armando catches a break because it turns out that Pavalon creates this really unique signature,

which meant yes, they can identify this drug. And so now it's time to see if what works in pig livers works in human bodies. So in the spring of 1999, the cops start driving out to the graveyards and bodies start getting exhumed. And John said even for him, this pulling out bodies from the ground, this was rough. I've seen a lot of dead bodies,

but when you exhume a body, it's unnatural. You're pulling the casket out of the ground, you're cracking open the casket, and you don't know what you're gonna find. One time we open the casket, and you don't know what you're going to find. One time we opened the casket and the maggots inside the casket were jumping out like I can remember them landing on my protective gear on my chest. That is rough. That's like not part of the job description.

So the caskets get opened, bodies removed, tissue samples are taken out and then sent to the lab of last resort. Finally, after all this time, Armando and his colleagues start testing their very first patient. And at this point, if they find Pavalon in these bodies, it really does mean there was no reason for Pavalon to be in their system unless Efren had put it in there. So they start testing patients. We didn't see anything.

I mean, there was no signal. Then the second set of samples for the second patient, and there was nothing there. And then, you know, the third one, nothing there. And then I'm thinking, oh, God, what's going on? Is there just nothing in some of these tissues? You start to doubt whether you're gonna see anything. And then they test the fourth patient.

And I was like, I got something here. There's, it's there. anything. And? Then they test the fourth patient. And I was like, I got something here. It's there. And so I ran over to Brian again. I pretty much ran over there saying, you got to look at this. We got a hit on this. It's confirmed. It's there.

It was that, yes, we did it. So then we were on a roll and we started looking at various tissues from that individual. And sure enough, we were getting positives on the kidney, on the bladder tissue, on the brain. So all of these, that one patient was hot. Wow. Yeah, they test another body, they don't find it, but then they get another hit and another hit and they tell the cops, you know, this pavillon, we are finding it. And John remembers how he felt. So finding the drug was a huge moment. We kind of erupted in clapping and like cheering type of thing. And

then finding the drug in multiple patients, that was the, then we knew. We knew we had it. They did it. They did it. So do they have to go exhumed every single patient that he's ever come in contact with? Or like, how, like, where do they go from there? Yeah. So they picked out the 20 patients that were most suspicious because they couldn't exhumed a thousand bodies. So these are the suspicious cases. And do they think that the others truly didn't have it in their system? Like they would have detected that or they're unsure about the other ones?

I think we don't know. They could have been killed with succinylcholine instead, or it could have been that the pavillon wasn't at too low levels to detect, or it could be been that the Pavillon wasn't too low levels to detect, or it could be that maybe the rest of the patients actually weren't killed by Ephraim. We don't know. That's the thing. When you don't find the chemical, you just don't know what the answer is. But finding the chemical showed that at least with six patients, there was this drug in

there. Wow. Because that's how many patients, that's how many bodies that they found, Pavalon in the end, it was six, including Jose Alfaro, who fought in World War II, Sal Biasatrian, and Eleonora Schlegel, who toasted to the New Year with her son. And still after this test, the cops actually aren't ready to arrest Efren just yet because this was happening just a few years after the O.J. Simpson trial and that case kind of fell on its face because the cops messed

up and mishandled evidence. So Armando and his colleagues not only test the bodies for Pavillon, but then all kinds of stuff around the bodies, because there was this suggestion that maybe Pavillon would be in the soil or would have been in the crypt water or the embalming fluid and then made its way into the bodies. And so they test that stuff. Everything's looking fine. You know, when Ian Musgrave, who was our pharmacologist, read details about their work, he said, and

I have never heard an academic describe a paper like this, but he said it was like seeing an experienced figure skater. Every move is smooth and beautiful. I love that. This one can appreciate the art. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And so in January 2001, this is three years

after Efren's first confession, the cops arrest him on his way to work at a construction site. John brings him in for questioning. He tells Efren all the evidence that they have, that Pavillon was found in six bodies. Well, we kept asking them, how many do you think you killed? He's very soft spoken and you can barely hear him. I think sometimes he was like writing stuff down and passing notes to us in the interview.

And as John remembers it, Efren confesses to killing the patients. And at first he won't say how many he killed. And instead he tells John what it takes to kill patients using Pavillon. And he says, with just one vial, you can kill a lot of people. Well, I can kill 10 people per vial, you can kill a lot of people. Well, I can kill 10 people per vial, and I probably had used 10 or 20 vials over the years, and so it was probably 100 to 200. What? Yeah.

Oh my gosh. Your mouth fell agape when you heard these numbers. Tell me what you're thinking. That's so prolific. And it's, how do you even, has he kept a record of who these people were? How do you even go back and try and find out who they were? No, he didn't remember the patients.

I mean, he even said that he like lost count at 60 patients. And he can't still be saying like he was like trying to save them from their own suffering, right? So as for the question of why he did it, John actually got, when I asked him, the cop, you know, what do people get wrong when they report this story? And he got quite passionate and he just said, you know, this case has been reported as an angel of death case that Efrem was trying to reduce their suffering. But for this case, I mean, John says that they were specifically looking for victims who were getting better.

You know, like you said, who were toasting New Year's, who wanted to live. And in that confession room, Efrain told John that there was a completely different reason for doing what he did. He would get irritated that he would have to go tend to a patient. So bottom line with him was every patients were irritants. They disrupted his day. You know, patients in the hospital are very needy and clicking that button a lot. And so he confessed to killing because of workload. Sir, what did you think you were signing up for?

Yeah. You could have worn scrubs at home. What the f***? I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on this, but what the f***? Yeah. Yeah. What? Yeah.

He told the police that, quote, it was not something that gave me joy. And then he said, quote, only when I was only at my wits end on the staffing, I'd look at the board, who we got to get rid of. What? So callous. We talked to Sarah, our science journalist, about the victims. There was one woman who actually survived the attempt

because he didn't give her enough, and she pressed the call button too much and annoyed him. And so, he dosed her. There's like, that doesn't even like, that doesn't even like register. I just... Like can someone be that cold? It almost would make more sense if he, you know, did like get some kind of like joy or something from the actual killing. Like that almost makes more sense to me than just being like, well, too many people today.

So like, which one's gonna lose their life so we can like have a manageable schedule. Yeah. Efren took a plea deal and was eventually convicted of killing the six patients that Armando and his colleagues found Pavalon in. Efren was sentenced to six consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole for the murder counts

and 15 years to life for the attempted murder of Jean Coyle, who was the woman who survived. And there is this extra weird twist to this story, Ashley, because if Efren had gone to trial instead of taking a plea deal, he might've been faced with the death penalty. And at that time, if he got the death penalty, do you wanna guess?

They would've used the same drug. Yes, one of the drugs that they would've used to kill him was Pavillon. Wow. So Ashley, that's the case of how some nerds used some smooth and beautiful moves to catch a killer. I love it. Science saved the day. Yeah, I mean, I think science is always saving the day, right?

Like in the world that we live in. And I love this because I love the idea that, oh, we didn't know what, that a test didn't exist. And so instead of being like, oh, sorry, there's something to do. That doesn't mean it can't happen. Science is like happening all the time around us. If we like make it happen, just because a test doesn't exist today, doesn't mean it won't tomorrow. Yeah, exactly.

Thank you so much for joining the show, Ashley. Thank you for having me. If you want to know more about this case, then go check out our transcript. So in the show notes for this episode, there's a link to our transcript and it's fully cited. So there's links to Armando's amazing work that looks like a figure skater, and also links to some amazing reporting that was done by staff at the LA Times who we used to help make this episode. Also, Sarah Skoll's book is called Countdown, The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons.

And this story didn't make the cut, so it's called Countdown, The Blinding future of nuclear weapons. And this story didn't make the cut, so it's called Countdown, the blinding future of nuclear weapons. This episode was produced by Katie Foster Keyes and Joel Werner, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, along with Meryl Horne, Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Sam Bear. Fact checking by Diane Kelly.

Music written by So Wiley, Bobby Lord and Bumi Hidaka. A special thanks to Roland Campos, Steve Wampler, Audrey Williams, the Audio Chuck team, Jasmine Kingston, Connor Sampson, Stupid Old Studios and Penny Greenhalgh. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you are listening on Spotify, follow us and tap the bell icon so you'll get notifications when new episodes come out. Also, if you do like the show, we would love it if you would give us a five-star review because it really helps new listeners find the show. I'm Wendy Zuckerman, back to you next time.