In late June 1974 a series of unexpected deaths at Petersburg General Hospital’s coronary care unit prompted an internal inquiry. One of those victims was 85-year-old farmer John Wesley Wray, who had been admitted on June 28 with breathing difficulties and was not thought to be in imminent danger. He died on June 29 during the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. graveyard shift — the same staffing period that linked a string of other sudden fatalities.

A 21-year-old nurse’s aide, Lee Roy Hargrave Jr., was on duty for each of the suspicious deaths. A supervising nurse, Joyce Lee Andrews, reported seeing Hargrave yelling at Wray the night he died, and later heard him make a remark about an IV and the fate of the previous patient. A vial of the heart drug lidocaine was found missing from the medicine chest; subsequent exhumations and autopsies detected lethal lidocaine injections in several patients, including Wray.

Hargrave was arrested in August 1974 and charged in five deaths. At trial the state proceeded first on the killing of Josephine L. Thomas; testimony included the circumstances around Wray’s final hours and Nurse Andrews’s observations. The jury convicted Hargrave of first-degree murder in that case and he received a life sentence, after which prosecutors did not try him for the others. If anyone knew John Wesley Wray or was at Petersburg General in 1974, did you notice anything unusual on the graveyard shift?