Serial killer ‘hid in plain sight’ to stalk halls of hospital

‘You are the monster no one sees coming.’

These were the chilling words issued in court to Reta Mays, the serial killer who carried out a killing rampage at the Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centre in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

The 46-year-old had been sentenced to life behind bars. Before being handcuffed, she buried her head in her hands and burst into tears.

Mays’ campaign of violence had left seven people dead. Her victims – aged between 81 and 96 – included veterans who served in Korea, Vietnam and in World War Two. Why Mays carried out the murders remains something of a mystery, even today.

Who was Reta Mays?

Born in 1975, Mays served on in non-combat roles with the West Virginia National Guard and the 1092nd Engineer Battalion. She was discharged from the military on good terms in 2005 and worked as a corrections officer at North Central Regional Jail in Greenwood, West Virginia for several years.

In 2015 she became a nursing assistant at the VA Medical Centre in the city of Clarksburg. Her duties included measuring patients’ vital signs, changing their sheets and simply sitting with the patients. Outside of work, Mays attended the Monroe Chapel United Methodist church.

‘Rita had this kind of secret life’, explains Dominic Utton, author of new book Faces of Evil, which features Mays’ crimes.

‘She was a nurse, had served in the National Guard, previously worked in a prison and was a member of her local church. On paper, she was a really good person. But if you picked away at the scab and got past that respectable veneer, you’d see a whole different story.’

Mays’ life had slowly unravelled in 2012 when her husband, Gordon, was jailed on child pornography charges. It was an incident that set shockwaves through the small West Virginia community, especially as Rita decided to stand by him.

The following year, while working at the North Central Regional Jail, Mays had been accused of beating an inmate. According to the man, she ‘bent over him, spit [sic] in his face, and said “How do you like that motherf*****. You ain’t that tough now are you?’ The case was dropped before it could reach trial.

How did Reta Mays carry out her murders?

In the summer of 2017, Mays was assigned to work overnight shifts on Ward 3A of the VA hospital. Soon, patients began suffering acute drops in blood sugar – an instance referred to as hypoglycemia – out of nowhere. There were about 20 suspicious deaths at the facility during the time Mays worked there, but charges were only brought in cases where the government thought it had sufficient evidence.

Robert Edge Sr. had been the first patient targeted by Mays; he died in July 2017. Over the next 11 months, six more patients died in somewhat mysterious circumstances, which hospital staff also attributed to hypoglycemia. 

Unbeknownst to her colleagues, Mays had been stealing insulin from medication rooms and creeping into hospital wards to inject the elderly veterans. Insulin can be crucial in keeping diabetics’ blood sugar in check, but for non-diabetics and those who aren’t prescribed the medication – it can be deadly.

It wasn’t until June 2018 that the string of suspicious deaths began to be taken seriously. The pace had accelerated at this point, with four patients dying within weeks of each other.

Dominic explains: ‘It’s quite a common thing to have a big gap between victim one and victim two, a smaller gap, then a kind of rampage – which often leads to them getting caught. Reta Mays killed her first victim in July 2017, then targeted her second in January 2018. Then, the timeframes kept getting smaller. She just went for it as she got more confident.

‘Serial killers like Ted Bundy were the same,’ he adds. ‘These people get a taste for killing, realise they’re getting away with it and keep going.’

Mays’ victims included Felix Kirk McDermott, 82, George Nelson Shaw, Sr, 81, Archie Edgell, 84, Robert Edge, Sr, 82, Robert Kozul, 89, Raymond Golden, 88, and 96 year-old William Alfred Holloway. 

An investigation was finally launched in summer 2018 after Inspector General Michael Missal, of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), was told ‘there may be an “Angel of Death” in Clarksburg.’

How the killer was finally caught

‘You think of serial killers as being these evil masterminds, these creative geniuses,’ Dominic says.

‘What I realised quite quickly when writing Faces of Evil is that a lot of them are quite stupid, and really quite rubbish at being serial killers. Reta Mays was terrible, the murderer was so blatantly her. People only died when she was on shift, she had access to the insulin which had killed them, she’d be on the phone to her husband saying her patients were so annoying she wanted to “kill them” – she didn’t cover her tracks at all.’

Mays’ crimes only managed to go unnoticed due to ‘oversights’ at the VA Hospital. Insulin stocks weren’t tracked, there were no CCTV cameras on Ward 3A and reports on each death weren’t pieced together or compared. The hospital was later accused by the Veterans Administration of missing chances to ‘avert’ Mays’ rampage, in a scathing 100-page report.

It took police two years to fully investigate Mays’ actions, with 300 interviews carried out. Detectives noted that she had watched a Netflix show called ‘Nurses Who Kill’ – which featured one episode about insulin used as a murder weapon- and had searched ‘female serial killers’ online.  

Investigators unearthed calls made from Mays to Gordon, her husband behind bars. In one, she lamented having to sit with a patient she wanted to ‘freaking strangle’ while, in another call, she complained about having sore arms after carrying out chest compressions on a veteran who had ‘no quality of life.’

Incredibly, Mays remained free during the two year probe, although she had been fired from her job at the hospital. Police questioned her three times during the course of the investigation. Each time, she denied any involvement in the deaths.

In July 2020, Mays was arrested after police complied a stack of evidence. Two weeks later, she pleaded guilty to seven counts of second-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. Weeping in court, she trembled and said ‘Yes sir’ when asked by a judge in Clarksburg, West Virginia, if she was guilty. She claimed she wanted the veterans to slip away ‘peacefully’.

Mays disclosed to police that she ‘had a lot of stress and chaos in [her] personal and professional life and these actions gave [her] a sense of control.’

Jay T. McCamic, Mays’ defense lawyer added the nursing assistant had a history of mental health issues, PTSD and sexual trauma linked to her time in the military. 

In response, District Judge Thomas Kleeh told Mays: ‘None of these other folks [veterans] are killers, let alone serial killers. You are not special. Several times your counsels made the point that you shouldn’t be considered a monster. Respectfully, I disagree with that. You are the worst kind. You’re the monster that no one sees coming.’

The infamous legacy of the ‘Angel of Death’

William Edge, a son of Mays’ victim, Robert Edge Sr. who died in July 2017, praised the life sentence his father’s killer received. ‘There will never be closure’, he added. ‘But I don’t feel cheated or anything. This is finally justice.’

Meanwhile the daughter-in-law of Robert Kozul, who died in January 2018, spoke of the fact he never met his great-grandson. She said to Mays: ‘You took all that away from him. Why should you ever be let out of prison to enjoy freedom?’

In a video statement, Norma Shaw, widow of George Shaw, said her defenceless husband would have been ‘trapped in his own body’ when Mays administered him with insulin.

‘I don’t know why Reta did what she did. I don’t know if we’ll ever know. But she took my life away from me,’ she would later say.

For many, there remains a mystery as to what exactly led Mays on her killing rampage.

‘Most female serial killers are either controlled by men, like Rose West or Myra Hindley, or they’re acting out some sort of revenge. But with Reta Mays, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for what she did,’ says Dominic. 

‘You can retrospectively try to think of reasons. As she said, her victims were older, maybe she genuinely wanted to “put them out of their misery.”

‘Or maybe she liked the attention. After she injected each patient, she’d be at their bedside, sometimes comforting relatives. So she maybe got a sense of self worth out of that. But that’s all amateur psychology really. 

‘What it really boils down to is that there’s no reason she did what she did, and that’s pretty scary.

‘A motiveless murder is truly monstrous.’

You can buy Faces of Evil: Unmasking the World’s Most Horrific Serial Killers by Dominic Utton by clicking here.

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