Reta Mays- The Woman Who Killed Army Veterans With Insulin

Reta Phyllis Mays, who was born in the United States on June 16, 1975, is a convicted serial killer.

Between July 2017 and June 2018, she killed at least seven elderly military veterans by giving them lethal doses of insulin while she worked as a nursing assistant at the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Medical Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

The Beginning

Reta Mays was born in West Virginia's Reynoldsville. She served in the United States Army West Virginia National Guard from November 2000 to April 2001 and again from February 2003 to May 2004 with the 1092nd Engineer Battalion in Iraq and Kuwait.

Prior to becoming a nursing assistant at the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Medical Center, Mays worked from 2005 to 2012 as a prison officer for the West Virginia Department of Corrections at the North Central Regional Jail in Greenwood, West Virginia.

The Crime

Mays began working as a nursing assistant at the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Medical Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, in June 2015, despite not being certified or licensed to care for patients. At the VA Medical Center, nursing assistants are not qualified nor allowed to give any kind of medications to patients.

Mays was assigned to serve overnight shifts in the medical surgical section of the hospital in July 2017, when elderly patients began experiencing unexplained, severe dips in blood sugar level.

Over the course of eleven months, the hospital staff found that hypoglycemia was the cause of death for several patients on the ward. A lot of the deaths were of people who did not need insulin. Four of the deaths happened in a span of 16 days.

Investigating The Deaths

One patient, 84-year-old Korean War veteran Archie Edgell, originally had a reduction in blood sugar to 24(a reading of less than 70 is low and can be harmful).

Staff members were able to stabilize him, but a little while later, his blood sugar fell again, and he passed away. After his death, an autopsy revealed that Edgell had received four insulin injections. His death prompted the hospital management to start their internal investigation.

The investigation into the deaths of the senior veterans of the armed forces began in June 2018 and continued for more than two years. Mays was not detained; she was interviewed three times during the investigation.

Each time, she denied responsibility for the deaths. The second interview with Mays lasted five hours and was conducted by a special agent from the FBI.

By that time, investigators had a strong evidence against Mays, including her internet searches for female serial killers, her viewing of the Netflix series Nurses Who Kill, one episode of which focused on insulin killings, and phone calls she made to her husband, Gordon, who was incarcerated on child pornography charges, in which she bemoaned having to sit with a patient she wanted to "freaking strangle," the call was made the morning following one of the blood sugar crises.

Arrest, Trial and Sentencing

In July 2020, Mays was taken into custody and charged with killing eight people.

Later, the charges were lowered to seven counts of second-degree murder and one count of trying to kill someone. This was about the death of 92-year-old US Navy veteran Russell R. Posey Sr., who died two weeks after being injected with insulin.

Prosecutors said that there were about twenty suspicious deaths at the hospital where Mays worked, but charges were only brought in the cases where there was enough evidence.

Mays pleaded guilty to seven counts of second-degree murder and one count of attempted murder on July 14, 2020, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Clarksburg.

Mays was given seven consecutive life sentences plus 20 years on May 11, 2021.