VA Case Bedside Lineup: He Nodded His Head

VA Case Bedside Lineup

He Nodded His Head

By John Barton
Staff Reporter

DETROIT — An impromptu bedside lineup led federal investigators to suspect a Filipina nurse was involved in mass murder and attempted murders at the Ann Arbor VA Hospital.

The lineup was staged on Aug 16, 1975, hours after someone at the hospital allegedly tried to murder a heart patient named John McCrery. McCrery survived the attack, but he died less than a year later.

Delmar E. Ward, an FBI agent assigned to the Ann Arbor office, testified in federal court here Tuesday that during the bedside lineup McCrery identified Filipina Narciso as a nurse he had seen inject something into his intravenous feeding tubes when he suffered a sudden breathing failure some 24 hours before.

Narciso, 30, of Ypsilanti, and another former nurse at the hospital, 32-year-old Leonora Perez of Ann Arbor, are accused of murdering two patients and poisoning eight others during a six-week period in July and August, 1975.

Under a revised federal indictment, which was handed down late Monday, the women, both of whom are natives of the Philippines, also are accused of entering into a conspiracy in which they poisoned 12 hospital patients and murdered two more.

The original indictment issued June 16, last year, accused them of killing five men and poisoning 10 others. It has been dismissed.

The women are accused of deliberately injecting Pavulon, a powerful muscle relaxing drug that can cause suffocation within minutes, into the victims’ intravenous feeding tubes.

They are to go on trial March 1 before U.S. District Court Judge Philip Pratt in Detroit. If convicted on any one of the 11 counts outlined in the indictment, they could be sentenced to life in prison.

Ward, testifying as a prosecution witness in pretrial hearings on defense motions to suppress McCrery’s identification, and a three-letter note McCrery wrote to doctors shortly after the attack, said three nurses, including Narciso, were called one-by-one to McCrery’s bed and asked to explain how the intravenous tubes were connected to McCrery’s body.

As each nurse left, McCrery, who could not speak because a tube was in his throat, was asked if she were the one who gave him the injection.

McCrery shook his head “no” to all of the nurses except' Narciso, Ward testified. As she left the room. Ward said McCrery nodded his head once. Ward said he was convinced McCrery was identifying Narciso as his assailant.

Ward also testified that at the time the bedside lineup was conducted, none of the nurses knew they were taking part in an FBI investigation.

According to Ward and added testimony from Gary L. Calhoun, a VA Hospital administrator, Narciso was asked to participate in the lineup because of a three-letter note McCrery wrote after he was revived following the apparent attack on his life.

McCrery’s note read “PIA.” It was written in response to a doctor’s question about whether he could remember who gave him the shot that nearly claimed his life.

Narciso’s nickname is “P.I.,” and some hospital staff members, including Arnold Mouish, an information officer at the Fuller Road facility, concluded McCrery was referring to Narciso, Calhoun said.

McCrery, however, will be unable to testify who or what he meant when he wrote the PIA note.

He died last June after suffering a major heart attack while mowing the lawn at his Coloma, Mich., home. He was 50 years old.

Calhoun, who was also present during Ward’s lineup, testified he thought McCrery meant Narciso when he wrote the note.

“It was clear to me,” Calhoun testified about McCrery’s identification, “that Mr. McCrery was identifying ‘PIA’ — the person I believed to be Miss Narciso. There’s no doubt in my mind that ‘PIA’ and the individual Mr. McCrery identified in his note were the same.”

At the same time, however, other witnesses called Tuesday said McCrery identified his assailant at various times as a Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a man.

McCrery himself died without any memory of writing the note or making the identification of Narciso. Authorities believe he experienced some form of amnesia when he underwent open-heart surgery a few days after the Aug. 15 attack.

Ward testified that he spoke with McCrery about a week after the lineup. At that time, McCrery could not remember Ward, Narciso, the lineup or anything concerning his stay in the VA hospital, the FBI agent testified.

In other arguments Tuesday, the defense team called two witnesses and concluded their assault on the credibility of another key prosecution witness in the case.

That witness, Richard Neely, a 62-year-old retired factory worker from Osceola, Ind., claims he saw Perez in his hospital room shortly before he experienced a sudden breathing failure the night of July 30, 1975.

The defense lawyers claim Neely has no “true, independent recollection” surrounding the attack. They say FBI agents planted Perez’s image in Neely’s mind during three hypnotic trances, creating, through highly suggestive questions, a false memory of the attack.

Witnesses have also been called who said Neely had a long history of mental problems and is “an alcoholic, a black-out drunk.”

The pretrial hearings were to continue this morning with federal prosecutors scheduled to call more witnesses to support their contentions as to the validity of the McCrery note and his identification of Narciso as his assailant.