Genene Ann Jones, a former beautician who went to nursing school to better support her two children, wanted to leave controversy behind when she quit a tumultuous job in San Antonio and moved to the quiet hill country of Kerrville, Texas.
But what appeared to be a new start in Kerrville, about 50 northwest of San Antonio, turned into a murder charge.
Ms. Jones, 33, was convicted Wednesday of killing 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan with an injection of the muscle relaxant, succinylcholine.
She still faces a total of eight counts of injury to a child - seven in Kerrville and one in San Antonio.
Described by one of her closest friends -- Debbie Sultenfuss, a vocational nurse who testified in the murder trial -- as quick-minded and 'an excellent teacher,' Ms. Jones was pictured by other co-workers as loud, coarse and overly aggressive with a penchant for dirty jokes.
The adopted daughter of a nightclub owner and his wife, Ms. Jones married her high school sweetheart, James H. DeLany Jr., in June 1968 and went to work as a beautician.
The couple had a son, Richard Michael, in 1972. The boy, now 12, has been living in a group foster home since his mother was jailed last October.
The DeLanys were divorced in 1974, but a brief reconciliation resulted in 1977 in the birth of their second child, 6-year-old Heather, who is residing with Ms. Jones' mother in San Antonio.
Ms. Jones entered vocational nursing school in 1977 in her native San Antonio and went to work at a local hospital. She was asked to resign eight months later because of what she described as a conflict with a doctor.
After another brief stint in another hospital, she got a job on Oct. 30, 1978, in the pediatric intensive care unit at what is now Medical Center Hospital in San Antonio.
When she left that job 3 years later, she left behind a secret report by the hospital board that implicated her in the mysterious deaths of 10 children.
The babies, along with seven others who survived unexplainable emergencies, seemed to stop breathing, bleed from old puncture marks or suffer seizures while in Ms. Jones' care, the report said.
Although hospital officials eventually asked Ms. Jones to move to another ward in the hospital, no action was taken against her and the authorities were not contacted.
She quit and agreed to go to work for pediatrician Kathleen Holland, who had heard but discounted the rumors about Ms. Jones, in the doctor's new clinic in Kerrville, a small community with a largely elderly population.
According to trial testimony, within a month of the clinic's opening on Aug. 23, 1982, at least six children -- including Chelsea - experienced inexplicable emergencies while in the nurse's care.
The events caught the attention of doctors at Kerrville's Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital, who contacted law enforcement authorities.
The Kerrville investigation ignited a subsequent probe in San Antonio, resulting in one charge of injury to a child against Ms. Jones stemming from an incident in early 1982 at Medical Center Hospital. A grand jury is continuing an investigation into other incidents at the San Antonio hospital.
