The "Dr. X" killings were a series of suspicious deaths by curare poisoning, in 1966 at a Bergen County, New Jersey hospital. A newspaper investigation during the mid-1960s led to the indictment of an Argentina-born physician, Mario Enrique Jascalevich (August 27, 1927 — September 1984), in 1976. He was acquitted at trial in 1978.
Career
Jascalevich was born in Buenos Aires on August 27, 1927. After completing his medical training in Argentina, he came to the United States to perform an internship at Passaic General Hospital in 1955, setting up his practice in New Jersey. He was hired as a surgeon by Riverdell Hospital in Oradell, New Jersey in 1962 and developed a surgical stapler that was named for him. At the time of his murder trial, he was a resident of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
Initial investigation
In 1966, authorities with the Bergen County, New Jersey prosecutor, including Guy W. Calissi, launched an investigation of nine suspicious deaths at Riverdell Hospital in Oradell. The patients had been admitted to the hospital for surgery and died of unrelated causes, before or after routine surgical procedures.
The investigation was commenced on November 1, 1966, after eighteen vials of curare – most nearly empty – were found in a locker assigned to Dr. Mario Jascalevich. When confronted, he explained that he had been experimenting with dogs. No motive could be ascertained for homicide. Ten years passed before the state charged Jascalevich with five counts of murder, in May 1976.
Newspaper investigation
The case had lain dormant for a decade when The New York Times received a letter from a woman claiming that as many as 40 patients had been murdered at a hospital by its chief surgeon. The letter handed to reporter M. A. Farber offered no information as to where the alleged murders had occurred or who the murderer was, if there was anything at all to the letter.
Farber pursued the case by speaking with someone in the forensic toxicology field who was able to recall a case at Riverdell Hospital, a private medical facility that had since closed. Further investigation led to the identification of Dr. Mario Jascalevich as the hospital's chief surgeon. While Jascalevich's surgical patients routinely survived, those of a new surgeon were dying at a significantly high rate. This new surgeon, together with directors of the hospital, opened Jascalevich's locker on October 31, 1966 and found 18 near empty vials of curare, a powerful muscle relaxant that could cause death if not administered in conjunction with artificial respiration.
The hospital reported their findings to the Bergen County, New Jersey prosecutor's office and its chief at the time, Guy W. Calissi. Farber was given the opportunity to review the files from the 1966 investigation, and found a comment from Calissi that said that "someone is lying". Though Calissi's suspicions were strong, he and his assistant Fred C. Galda had come to the conclusion at the time that hard evidence did not exist to move further with the case. When Farber contacted Calissi in 1975, Calissi called the claim that the circumstances of the deaths were plausible to be "horsesh-t" and remained convinced that his suspicions in the case were accurate that there had been criminal actions involved in the deaths.
Farber's investigations led him to try to contact the families of the potential victims, in some cases notifying relatives for the first time that the deaths had been deemed suspicious. His attempts to contact Jascalevich, then in private practice, were all unsuccessful despite repeated letters, phone calls and even attempts to approach him outside of his offices. Farber tried to follow up on Jascalevich's statement in his 1966 deposition that the curare had been used in experiments on dying dogs, but was unable to get any confirmation that dogs had been supplied to him as described.
The results of Farber's investigation were first published in The Times in January 1976, referring to the unidentified physician as "Dr. X", and caused a media stir. The Record, the largest paper in the area, picked up the story, covering it with as many as 13 reporters. Other papers nationwide picked up the story as well.
Bergen County Prosecutor Woodcock opened an independent investigation, exhuming the bodies of five possible victims, none of whom had been administered curare during their surgical procedures. Using new technologies, investigators found traces of curare in three of the bodies.