Minutes after being convicted of murder, nurse’s aide Lee Roy Hargrave Jr. is taken out of court after attempting suicide via drug overdose. He is suspected of killing up to 26 patients. Hargrave had once remarked to a nurse that he was always the one to get the bodies, Virginia, 1975 [714 x 745].

[Lee “Roy” Hargrave Jr.](https://www.historicalcrimedetective.com/serial-killers-anonymous-lee-roy-hargrave-jr-released-in-2010-after-35-years-in-prison/)

[HORROR IN THE HOSPITAL](https://www.historicalcrimedetective.com/pdf/hargrave-1991.pdf)

On the night of June 29, Joyce Lee Andrews found Hargrave yelling at 85-year-old patient Thomas Wray, a farmer admitted the day before complaining of troubled breathing. When intravenous feeding was ordered for Wray, Hargrave seemed pleased, Andrews said later. She quoted him as saying, “I hope the same thing won’t happen that happened to the last patient you put on IV.” A half-hour later, Wray was dead and a vial of lidocaine was missing from the medicine chest. That was the final straw for Andrews, who’d been growing increasingly suspicious of Hargrave.

>”After that night I was no longer suspicious. I was sure.”

Hargrave only stood trial for one murder, that of Josephine L. Thomas, a 73-year-old former Petersburg school teacher on August 14, 1974. On May 7, 1975, Hargrave was convicted of first degree murder, with the jury fixing his sentence at life in prison. When Hargrave got the verdict, he showed no emotion. He simply asked to go to the bathroom for a drink of water. Not long after, he collapsed and was rushed to a Richmond hospital suffering from an overdose of amphetamines. Doctors saved him. They said he had taken some 20 pills.

The evidence against Hargrave in five other deaths was strong enough for further trial. However, prosecutors decline to charge him. Virginia did not have life without parole as a sentencing option and did not reinstate the death penalty until 1977. With neither life without parole nor the electric chair being on the table for Hargrave, prosecutors presumably felt that more trials were pointless. Hargrave spent 35 years in prison for the murder of Josephine Thomas. He was paroled at the age of 56 in 2010.

[‘Lidocaine killer’ Hargrave released from prison](https://www.progress-index.com/story/news/2010/03/04/lidocaine-killer-hargrave-released/36483649007/)

Hargrave may be the most prolific serial killer in the history of Virginia. The most prolific confirmed serial killers in the commonwealth are the Briley Brothers. Whereas the case Hargrave has been almost completely lost to history, I’m fairly certain that almost everyone over the age of 50 in Virginia knows about the Briley Brothers.