How LLNL Used Scientific Techniques – Including Spectrometry – To Catch A Serial Killer

By John Oncea, Editor

When authorities hit a roadblock investigating a suspected serial killer they turned to researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for help. Here’s how those researchers helped put the “Angel of Death” behind bars.

What has the world’s largest and highest-energy laser systems, houses the world’s heaviest hinged door, and recently launched the world’s fastest supercomputer? Why, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), of course.

Originally established in 1953 and now sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, LLNL is a federally funded research and development center located on a one-square-mile site in Livermore, CA. Its principal responsibility is ensuring the safety, security, and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons through the application of advanced science, engineering, and technology.

The laboratory also applies its special expertise and multidisciplinary capabilities toward preventing the proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction, bolstering homeland security, and solving other nationally important problems, including energy and environmental needs, scientific research and outreach, and economic competitiveness.

Given the nature of the research conducted there, conspiracy theories surrounding LLNL run rampant, often focusing on allegations of secretive research on advanced weapons systems, potential misuse of nuclear technology, and cover-ups regarding accidents or hazardous materials. In addition, there have been concerns about the lab’s influence on government policy, particularly regarding nuclear weapons development and testing.

However, most of these claims are unsubstantiated and, due to the sensitive nature of much of their work, LLNL is obligated to keep a significant portion of their research classified which can fuel speculation and conspiracy theories.

LLNL’s Work With Nuclear Weapons, Plutonium, And Global Security

Researchers at LLNL had a hand in developing many of the nuclear warheads that made up the military’s stockpile during the Cold War and, after the Cold War ended in 1991, helped sustain existing warheads for the indefinite future via the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP).

LLNL also has been instrumental in plutonium research, learning how it performs as it ages and how it behaves under high pressure. This research is conducted in a specially designed facility called the SuperBlock, along with work on highly enriched uranium.

Ensuring global security by reducing and mitigating the dangers posed by the spread or use of weapons of mass destruction and by threats to energy and environmental security is another area in which LLNL plays a role. Researchers have been working on global security and homeland security for decades, predating both the collapse of the Soviet Union and the September 11 terrorist attacks.

In addition, LLNL staff have been heavily involved in the cooperative nonproliferation programs with Russia to secure at-risk weapons materials and assist former weapons workers in developing peaceful applications and self-sustaining job opportunities for their expertise and technologies.

In the mid-1990s, scientists began efforts to devise improved biodetection capabilities, leading to miniaturized and autonomous instruments that can detect biothreat agents in a few minutes instead of the days to weeks previously required for DNA analysis.

Today, LLNL researchers address a spectrum of threats – radiological/nuclear, chemical, biological, explosives, and cyber. They combine physical and life sciences, engineering, computations, and analysis to develop technologies that solve real-world problems. Activities are grouped into five programs:

• Nonproliferation: Preventing the spread of materials, technology, and expertise related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and detecting WMD proliferation activities worldwide.
• Domestic security: Anticipating, innovating, and delivering technological solutions to prevent and mitigate devastating high-leverage attacks on U.S. soil.
• Defense: Developing and demonstrating new concepts and capabilities to help the Department of Defense prevent and deter harm to the nation, its citizens, and its military forces.
• Intelligence: Working at the intersection of science, technology, and analysis to provide insight into the threats to national security posed by foreign entities.
• Energy and environmental security: Furnishing scientific understanding and technological expertise to devise energy and environmental solutions at global, regional, and local scales.

There are other broad-ranging, scientific programs supported by LLNL that have contributed to the design, construction, and operation of laser systems; detected massive compact halo objects; and played a role in the creation of healthcare technologies such as a microelectrode array for construction of an artificial retina, a miniature glucose sensor for the treatment of diabetes, and a compact proton therapy system for radiation therapy.

It also played a role in catching Efrain Saldivar, a respiratory therapist at Glendale Adventist Medical Center and a serial killer.

Efrain Saldivar, The Self Proclaimed “Angel Of Death”

Efrain Saldivar was born in Brownsville, TX in 1969 and, while in junior high, moved to Los Angeles along with his mother and father. Attracted to high school gangs and petty theft, Saldivar’s school work suffered and, as a result, he failed to graduate high school.

He did eventually pass a high school equivalency test and was then accepted by the College of Medical and Dental Careers in North Hollywood, CA. Saldivar earned a certificate from the school and was hired as a respiratory therapist by the Glendale Adventist Medical Center, where he worked from 1989 to 1997.

It was during his time working at the hospital that Saldivar admitted to injecting Pavulon and succinylcholine chloride, two paralyzing drugs, and possibly morphine and suxamethonium chloride into the IVs of between 100 and 200 patients he doomed “ready to die.”

His reason for killing was simply to reduce his workload, something he confessed to in January 2001. “Oh, God, you can’t believe how flippant. It was not for personal pleasure. It was not a rush,” Saldivar told two members of a police task force, writes to the Los Angeles Times. “We had too much work,” Saldivar said. “When I was only at my wits’ end on the staffing, I’d look at the [patient] board. ‘Who do we gotta get rid of? . . . OK, who’s in bad shape here?’”

Saldivar was methodical in his killing, choosing victims already unconscious and close to death. His choice of victims resulted in no easily detectable rise in the rate or distribution of patient deaths when he was on duty and hampered the investigation as there were no easily discernible correlations between changes in the distribution or rate of deaths and his shift pattern.

Glendale Adventist terminated his employment on March 13, 1998, and shortly after he confessed to actively killing 50 patients and contributing to the deaths of the others. He later changed his confession to killing at least 60 patients by 1994 before losing count of how many others he killed over the next three years. Despite later recanting his confession, officials continued to investigate, searching for evidence that would be strong enough to obtain a conviction.

As part of the investigation, police exhumed the remains of patients who had died while Saldivar had been on duty and been buried and searched for a marker of unusually high levels of Pavulon in the cadaver, as this drug remains identifiable for many months.

A total of 1,050 patients had died at the hospital during Saldivar’s shift and police selected 20 bodies to exhume with six of the cadavers – Jose Alfaro, Salbi Asatryan, Myrtle Brower, Balbino Castro, Luina Schidlowski, and Eleanora Schlegel – showing evidence of a lethal concentration of Pavulon. The medical records of these patients showed that the Pavulon found in their bodies was not prescribed to them by a medical professional.

On March 12, 2002, at age 32, Saldivar “pleaded guilty March 12 to six counts of murder and one of attempted murder under a plea bargain that spared him the death penalty, also told police that he killed patients at two other hospitals where he moonlighted,” the Los Angeles Times writes. “He also said he ‘introduced’ two other respiratory therapists to killing.”

In addition to the six murders, Saldivar was charged with the attempted murder of Jean Coyle. “I’m a survivor … I’m very lucky,” Coyle, who was revived after a ‘code blue’ emergency in February 1997 and now lives in a nursing home,” writes the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t know if he thought he was God or what. It wasn’t right. I think that he should die.”

Because of a plea deal, the death penalty was off the table. Instead, Saldivar pleaded guilty to six counts of murder and received seven consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. Saldivar is incarcerated at California State Prison in Corcoran, CA.

Using Science To Catch A Killer

On her podcast, Science Vs, host Wendy Zuckerman and her guest, Ashley Flowers spoke to analytical chemist Armando Alcaraz to break down the science used by researchers at LLNL to help investigators come up with the proof needed to charge and convict Saldivar.

As noted earlier, investigators had exhumed and tested the remains of 20 Glendale Adventist residents who had died during Saldivar’s shifts and turned to LLNL for help. Specifically, they worked with LLNL’s Forensic Science Center (FSC), sometimes called “The Lab of Last Resort,” to help detect the tiny amounts of Pavulon and succinylcholine chloride they suspected were in the victims.

Alcaraz, an analytical chemist who was on the team that created the testing method used by FCS, “was a bit skeptical” that the lab could help. “I thought there was still going to be enough contamination and at such low levels that we weren’t going to be able to see it. And we would then have to sort of pull that needle out of a haystack.”

In this analogy, the needle is the drugs researchers were looking for and all of the other chemicals in the decomposing bodies were the haystack. For instance, some of these patients were smokers, so tobacco would have been contaminating their tissue, as would any embalming fluid that was used in the burying process.

Dirty water was seeping into the coffins by now, leeching in all of these chemicals from the soil surrounding them. That meant if you were looking in liquid in their bladder you wouldn’t know “whether it was real urine or whether water seepage had gotten into that coffin and there was moisture in it,” said Alcaraz. “And that’s what you're analyzing.”

The team immediately ruled out finding succinylcholine because it's just too hard to identify it in a human body after all this time. “And the reason is it breaks down real fast,” Alcaraz said. “And when it breaks down into the metabolites, those metabolites can be found in the human body anyway.

“So how could you go into a court, you know – a court of law, and say, well, here we found these metabolites? Well, the defense lawyers are going to go well, and what does that mean? They're normally found in a human body anyway.”

Pavulon, however, was a different story as the only reason it would be found in a person is if it were injected.

Searching For Pavulon In Pigs

Knowing identifying succinylcholine wasn’t an option, researchers created a test to identify Pavulon. Not wanting to use humans for their testing they turned to the next best option: pigs. Alcaraz and his colleagues added Pavulon to pig livers and allowed it to putrefy, then homogenize it. “You put it in a blender and make a milkshake out of it,” said Alcaraz.

The pig liver Pavulon milkshake sat out and decayed for months to make it more like what these bodies that have been decaying would have been like in the victims. Researchers then took the decaying pig milkshake that had been spiked with Pavulon and passed it through a solid-phase extraction polymer, a kind of plastic syringe that has a kind of filter in it –  or what’s called a cartridge — to separate Pavulon from all the other substances in these tissue samples.

There are different types of cartridges used to isolate different chemicals meaning researchers had to push tiny bits of samples through numerous syringes to find a cartridge that trapped Pavulon, a process that “can take days depending on how decayed the tissue is and how much mucus is in it.

Researchers worked 16-hour days for months, knowing the task force couldn’t move forward until they succeeded. Then one day Alcaraz heard a colleague say, “I think we’re there.”

“What the cartridge did was act like a magnet where it would just collect the drug or things similar to the drug and sort of gripped onto it,” said Alcaraz. “And then it allowed us to wash off all of the tobacco products and other biomaterials that were in the tissue. But the drug stayed attached. Yeah, that was amazing. That was the magic cartridge.”

Alcaraz then used mass spectrometry to extract all the chemicals in the cartridge and finally was able to identify Pavulon because it created a unique signature. So now it's time to see if what works in pig livers works in human bodies.

Searching For Pavulon In Victims

With a way to test victims’ bodies for Pavulon, tissue samples were sent to FCS for Alcaraz and his colleagues to test. The first three tests did not yield a hit, but the fourth test did. “So, then we were we were on a roll, and we started looking at various tissues from that individual,” said Alcaraz. “And sure enough, we were getting positives on the kidney, on the bladder tissue, on the brain.”

Further testing was hit-and-miss, but they did find enough victims with Pavulon in their tissue to notify officials who picked out the 20 patients that were most suspicious because they couldn't exhume a thousand bodies. Of those 20, six had the drug in them.

Still, there was one more hurdle keeping authorities from arresting Saldivar: the possibility of mishandled evidence. Because this investigation was taking place just a few years after the OJ Simpson trial police were leery about making some of the mistakes authorities investigating Simpson did.

So Alcaraz and his colleagues not only tested the bodies for Pavulon, but they also tested anything that came in contact with the bodies to rule out the possibility the drug could have come from there. This included the soil, as well as what was in the crypt water or the embalming fluid. Once those items were tested the authorities felt secure in arresting Saldivar.

Paying For His Crimes

In January 2001, three years after his first confession, police arrested Saldivar on his way to work at a construction site. After being brought in for questioning and presented with the evidence that Pavulon was found in six bodies Saldivar confessed to killing patients.

He wouldn’t say how many at first but told investigators that with one vial of Pavulon, he could kill 10 people. Saldivar said he had probably used 10 or 20 vials over the years, putting the estimated number of victims at between 100 to 200

Saldivar took a plea deal and was eventually convicted of killing the six patients that Alcaraz and his colleagues found Pavulon in. He was sentenced to six consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole for the murder counts and 15 years to life for the attempted murder of Coyle, the woman who survived.

Ironically, had Saldivar not taken the plea deal and was found guilty of the murders at trial he might have faced the death penalty which, at that time, included Pavulon, the very drug he used to commit his murders.