NOCONA, Texas — The shadows spilled across the grave on a June morning. The investigators stooped, gently lifted a sparrow's nest from the mound and broke the cemetery soil with a backhoe.
The federal agents had come for Oma Wyler's bones. Her daughters didn't want to see too much, so they waited out of sight, across the graveyard, while their mama's coffin was dragged from the earth.
"I didn't realize I'd feel such turmoil," said Wanda Russell, Wyler's eldest daughter. "But we have to find out what really happened. The not knowing is awful."
It was a queasy beginning to a strange summer in this town of about 3,000. Cicadas groaned, the heat thickened--and all week long, investigators dug up bodies throughout the rolling grasslands straddling the Red River. In showers of flying dirt, two coffins a day came to light.
In all, 10 corpses were dredged this month from the clay soil of Texas and Oklahoma, autopsied and returned to the earth.
All this to probe the mysterious winter deaths of elderly men and women at tiny Nocona General Hospital. Investigators suspect that as many as 20 patients may have died terrifying, silent deaths. They think somebody preyed on the frail and the elderly, striking with a poison that froze their muscles and stilled their breath.
But nobody is sure.
"Being uncertain is worse than knowing," Montague County Dist. Atty. Tim Cole said. "And unfortunately, we may not be able to wipe out that uncertainty."
A few things are unmistakable: Far too many people died on the overnight shift last winter. Lethal drugs turned up missing from the hospital pharmacy. In late February, a nurse was fired for undisclosed reasons. The inexplicable deaths stopped in February, hospital officials said.
No arrests have been made in the deaths, although Cole said he has a suspect, whom he declined to identify.
The Texas Board of Vocational Nurse Examiners said it is investigating Vicki Carson Jackson, the nurse who was dismissed this winter. Investigator Kirby Hattox declined to discuss the focus or details of that inquiry.
Jackson's lawyer did not return telephone calls to his office seeking comment, and Jackson could not be reached for comment at her home.
The family of one of the dead patients sued Jackson and the hospital last month, alleging the nurse caused the Christmas Eve death of 87-year-old Boyd Bruce Burnett with an unprescribed injection.
