Journalist Jake Adelstein left Missouri in the early 1990s to chart his own course reporting on Japanese organized crime. His career and work inspired the HBO series "Tokyo Vice” — but his latest project, the true-crime podcast series “Night Shift,” sees the Missouri native’s focus on his hometown of Columbia.
The series takes listeners back to 1992, to a particular ward at the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans' Hospital, where Adelstein’s father worked as a pathologist.
That year, a pattern of suspicious deaths sparked rumors of a possible “angel of death” who was killing dozens of patients. In the podcast, Adelstein interviews his father about that time and what it was like to contend with an inexplicable wave of “code blue” emergencies — designated for patients on the brink of death.
“A lot of these ‘code blues’ are happening during the night shift,” Adelstein told St. Louis on the Air. “That's the first thing that sets off alarm: Why are there so many of these emergencies? Why are there so many people getting violently ill at night and often dying?”
As described in the series, the search for a killer eventually led to nurse Richard Williams. Williams was later indicted on 10 counts of first-degree murder, but problems with forensic evidence led the Boone County prosecutor to dismiss the charges before trial — letting Williams walk free in 2003.
Despite the decades that have passed, Adelstein believes the story isn’t over.
“The families want closure,” he said. “[The case] has never been tried, not in criminal court, and I would hope that maybe with renewed interest in this, that people might go back to the evidence that hopefully is still on file, still frozen in a locker somewhere — and with modern forensic methods, and the way that science keeps developing, that they could reinvestigate and find out what really happened.”
To learn more about what happened after a string of suspicious deaths broke out in a Columbia veterans hospital, and to hear from Jake Adelstein’s father, pathologist Eddie Adelstein, listen to St. Louis on the Air on Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Podcast or by clicking the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Jada Jones is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr. Send questions and comments about this story to talk@stlpr.org.
