A Thesis Entitled:

In Passing:

The Death of Sandra Joyner and the Case against Sally Hill

submitted for Honors

to the English Department at Davidson,

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, with Honors.

by

Christine Morgan Noah

May 2014

Thesis Committee:

______________________________ ______________________________

Director: Cynthia Lewis, Ph.D.

Professor of English

submitted for review

______________________________ ______________________________

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Reader: Randy Ingram, Ph.D.

Professor of English

Reader: Zoran Kuzmanovich, Ph.D.

Professor of English

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my thesis director, Dr. Cynthia Lewis, for all of her support and

guidance throughout this process. I would also like to thank my thesis readers, Dr. Randy

Ingram, and Dr. Zoran Kuzmanovich, for their poignant insights and encouragement. In

addition, I could not have written this thesis without the help of Captain Chuck Henson, Jean

Lawson, Susan Weigand, Dr. Vittal Shenoy, Peter Gilchrist, The County Clerk’s Office of

Mecklenburg County, The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, The District

Attorney’s Office of Mecklenburg County, Melissa Treadway, formerly of the Charlotte

Observer, Dan Kane of the Raleigh News & Observer, the North Carolina Medical Board, and

the North Carolina Board of Nursing.

I woke up in the early morning to my phone buzzing with a new email. It was from the receptionist

of a defense lawyer I’d contacted about the Sandra Joyner case, and I hastily opened it in the hopes

that she’d be declaring his interest in meeting with me. To my disappointment, I got a veiled

rejection: “Mr. Golding is currently out of the country and I am unsure of when he is returning.”

How James Bond of him.

I wrote back a few times, inquiring of his whereabouts, but the receptionist never again responded.

I had already been rejected by several potential interviewees who had no interest in reconstructing

this debacle—but at least this one was creatively diplomatic. I lay there imagining Mr. Golding

staring at a tropical screensaver on his computer and saying, “You know what, tell her I’m out of the

country.” This case must be a lot more complicated than I’d thought.

******************************************************************************

On the morning of April 10, 2001, Sandra Joyner checked into the Center for Cosmetic and Plastic

Surgery in Charlotte, North Carolina. She and her husband, John, with whom she had two sons, had

separated a couple of years before, and their estrangement led to a nagging insecurity in Sandra.

She had already had some cosmetic surgery work done by Dr. Peter Tucker at this same office in

1999, to fix what she felt was a drooping eye; this time, she aimed to boost her self-confidence with

a mini-facelift, lip plumping, and lower eyelid resurfacing. They were standard procedures, and,

since Sandra had been an ideal patient last time, no one seemed concerned about potential

complications.

While Dr. Tucker’s CRNA, or certified registered nurse anesthetist, Sally Hill, was helping to

prepare Sandra for surgery, her mind turned back to an earlier time: Sandra and Sally had gone to

school together. When Sandra had come into the office two years earlier, Sally had immediately

recognized her as the pretty blonde cheerleader from Charlotte’s Olympic High. The two girls hadn’t

been close, but were acquaintances with many mutual friends; in fact, Sally may have even made a

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comment to a co-worker about Sandra “dating” or “stealing” her boyfriend in high school. At that

first appointment, Sandra hadn’t made the connection about Sally, and Sally hadn’t mentioned it to

her. But as she got Sandra ready for surgery this time, she brought it to Sandra’s attention, and the

two former classmates briefly reminisced.

Sandra was under the knife for about three and a half hours, and by 11:15 a.m. she was on

her way to the recovery room. Dr. Tucker checked on her before retiring to his office, and, though

CRNAs don’t typically care for patients post-op, another nurse asked Sally to look after Sandra so

that she could begin preparation for the next patient. After a few minutes, Sandra started to

experience some pain; to relieve it, Sally gave her 1 cc. of fentanyl, a highly potent narcotic. But it

wasn’t enough, and Sandra continued to complain about her discomfort, asking Sally if she was

being a bad patient; Sally assured her that she wasn’t and administered another 1 cc. of fentanyl to

alleviate Sandra’s pain.

Shortly thereafter, something went wrong. A few nurses came in and expressed concern about

Sandra, who appeared to be unresponsive, her fingernails starting to turn blue—but each time

Sally, whose position as a CRNA outranked them, assured them that everything was fine. Around

11:45 a.m., another nurse came in and realized that Sandra was in respiratory arrest; she ran to get

Dr. Tucker, who called 911 and tried to revive Sandra. She was rushed to the hospital, where she

was pronounced brain dead. Five days later, Sandra’s estranged husband took her off life support,

and she was gone.

Accidents such as this—though rare—still happen, particularly in plastic surgery when

procedures are held in private facilities that may not be as subject to monitoring as a hospital

would be. John Joyner was left to mourn the unexpected loss of the woman who had been his high

school sweetheart, and her sons, Grayson and Philip, only teenagers at the time, grieved for the

mother who had devoted her life to caring for them. The story appeared in the local newspaper, The

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Charlotte Observer, buried in the health section under a discussion of the need to reform non-

hospital surgical procedures. The North Carolina Medical Board and Board of Nursing investigated

the incident, finding both Dr. Tucker and Sally Hill culpable of neglect, and their respective licenses

were suspended for twelve months—although Sally would never renew hers because a battle with

leukemia would leave her too weak to work. John Joyner filed a civil lawsuit against both of them as

well, for which he received compensation on behalf of Sandra. And that was it—everyone moved

on.

So Sally Hill was quite surprised when, in June 2006, Detective Chuck Henson showed up on

her doorstep requesting to interview her about Sandra’s death. Somehow, five years after the

incident had occurred, Dr. Tucker convinced then District Attorney Peter Gilchrist and the

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department to investigate it as a murder case involving the

deliberate and malicious administration of potent narcotics. Sally Hill was the prime suspect. The

CMPD had been engaged in this investigation since January, and nine months later, on September 8,

2006, officers arrested Sally and charged her with first-degree murder.

The media seized upon the case, dubbing it the “thirty-year grudge,” the story of a high

school rivalry over a stolen boyfriend that led a nice, churchgoing woman to murderous revenge. It

got coverage on several major national news outlets, including a feature in People Magazine, and it

dominated the front page in The Charlotte Observer. The media conducted an extensive search into

Sally Hill’s past and present, and she was presented to the public as a woman who’d “snapped,”

who’d harbored hateful feelings for decades and had finally gotten a chance to act upon them—an

act for which she felt no remorse or regret. Even a true crime book was written about the case;

titled Beauty Sleep: A Glamorous Mother, a Woman from Her Past, and Her Mysterious Death, it

described Sandra’s death as a tantalizing thriller, in the style of a cheap paperback you might read

on the beach. People thought the case was sexy: set in a plastic surgery office, with its illicit use of

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drugs, its fight over an ex-boyfriend, and its underlying jealousy of beauty and class, it was a Days of

Our Lives episode waiting to happen.

Two months after her arrest, however, Sally Hill was released on bond, and the case, for the media,

at least, soon faded into obscurity. The police investigation began to wane, and eventually new

developments became a rare occurrence. When a new District Attorney, Andrew Murray, came into

office in January 2011, he reviewed all open cases; in the end, he dismissed North Carolina v. Sally

Hill due to insufficient evidence. The case that had started with an undeniable allure, captivating

audiences with its melodrama and scandal, ended with a banal dismissal.

In the summer of 2013, Googling the story out of curiosity, I found the People Magazine article,

watched some local news clips, and came to the same conclusion that audiences had come to before

me: this case is sexy. I decided to look into it myself, hoping to uncover more details from Sally and

Sandra’s past. But I found that the glamorous appeal of Sandra’s death shrouded something even

more mysterious and intriguing: the politics of the case against Sally Hill.

******************************************************************************

“Captain Henson?”

“Call me Chuck.”

When I first met Chuck Henson over breakfast, he seemed like the ideal police captain—polite,

personable, and confident, but subtly on his guard. Dressed in his spotless police uniform, peering

at me with sharp blue eyes set in a gentle, round face, he started the discussion with anecdotes of

being a single dad raising two boys and proceeded to tell me how he turned down a job with the FBI

in New York because he hates cold weather. He was full of stories, and he spoke about the Sally Hill

case as if he were relating the details of a novel to his book club. Before meeting with him, all that I

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knew about the case I’d learned from the limited perspective of secondary sources in the media—

his was my first first-hand account.

“I believe she did it. I know she did . . . I think she thought, you know, I'm gonna show this uppity

bitch, and she gave her too much, and she just sat there and watched her suffer.”

Henson was definitive about Sally’s guilt. But how had the charge against Sally even come about,

five years after Sandra’s death? In all of my poring through newspaper articles and local news

stories, I had never been able to find a trigger.

Henson’s answer: Jim Black.

Democrat James B. Black had begun his career as an optometrist in Charlotte before getting elected

to the North Carolina House of Representatives and serving as Speaker of the House from 1999 to

2006. In his role as Speaker, Black gained significant power and control over North Carolina

lawmaking—and he took full advantage of that power. In 2002, he almost lost control of the House,

but he secured his position by convincing a Republican named Michael Decker to switch to the

Democratic Party. When Decker lost his re-election race, Black got him a cushy job in the cultural

resources department—the salary for which was personally funded by Black himself. In 2005, after

his pretty young aide, Meredith Norris, left his office to become a lobbyist for a lottery company,

Black, who had once strongly opposed the idea of a state lottery, got legislation passed to

implement it. Throughout his terms in office, Black accepted blank checks from groups—most

notably optometrists, those from his own field, but also plastic surgeons and CRNAs—who wanted

legislation passed that would benefit them. But his dirty deeds finally caught up with him: in

February of 2007, he was sent to federal prison after he pled guilty to charges of public corruption.

But before Black’s scandal erupted, Henson told me, Peter Tucker had contributed a nice sum to his

campaign in 2003.

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In 2006, after Tucker had spent five years trying to convince everyone of Sally Hill’s malevolence to

no avail, he resorted to using this connection to his powerful friend. According to Chuck Henson,

“Jim Black went to [then District Attorney] Peter Gilchrist and said hey, this guy gives a lot of money

to my campaign, just meet with him. So he met with him and my boss,” Captain Sean Mulhall.

Captain Mulhall was skeptical; the incident had happened so long ago, and Tucker seemed only to

want to save face. “I mean he was the plastic surgeon, everybody went to him, strippers,

everybody,” Henson said. But since Sandra’s death, his malpractice insurance premiums had

skyrocketed and business had declined, so perhaps he needed someone else to take the blame.

Mulhall, said Henson, “came to me and he said, 'Just give this two weeks. Just to look into it so we

can say we did.’”

Once Henson started digging, however, he found a lot more than he had anticipated. Sally had in fact

engaged in some puzzling behavior that day. She’d turned off the pulse oximeter—which monitors a

patient’s blood oxygen levels and which is always supposed to be on in the recovery room—and

had instead plugged in the EKG machine, atypical for post-op observation. Rather than react or call

in Dr. Tucker when Sandra began to show signs of distress, Sally simply sat there eating a biscuit.

(The recurring biscuit image in the many accounts of what happened that day lends it a kind of

absurd comedic element; never has eating a biscuit been so criminal.) And, perhaps most damning

of all, Sally had altered the medication log that detailed how much fentanyl she had used, marking

that she had drawn up an extra 5 ccs., only to “discard” them without a witness, and changing the

date from April 10 to April 11. “It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that she’d changed her story

on the log,” Henson told me. “It was pretty clear.” Thus, not only were those 5 ccs. of fentanyl

unaccounted for, but Sally was claiming to have drawn them up in the future—on a day when the

office wasn’t even open—in order, he believes, to disassociate those 5 ccs. from Sandra’s death.

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When Henson and his partner went to interrogate her in June of 2006, Sally “wasn't expecting us,

which was what we wanted. She was in her bathrobe, you know,” an image he described as

“unpleasant, to say the least.” Sally denied any malicious wrongdoing. She had turned off the pulse

oximeter because its constant beeping was “annoying”—never mind that its alarm could have saved

Sandra’s life. She wasn’t sure why she had changed the date on the medication log, but she had

drawn up those 5 ccs. for the next patient and discarded them after Sandra was sent to the hospital.

She never went to get Dr. Tucker because she thought everything was under control. And she never

even got to finish her biscuit; she’d barely managed more than a few nibbles. Given the chance, she

couldn’t think of what she’d do differently.

Henson noted that she didn’t seem remorseful, didn’t act guilty—which made him all the more

suspicious. He theorized that Sally had given Sandra those “discarded” 5 ccs., which, combined with

what she had already administered, would surely have been enough to send Sandra into respiratory

arrest, he thought. But because it had been five years since the incident, Henson said, “all that

stuff”—medical records, including any blood samples—“got purged and we never got to see any of

it.” As Sandra’s death was declared an accident, no autopsy was done; and because she had been on

life support for five days before her death, the fentanyl would have been undetectable anyway.

Determining how much fentanyl Sally had actually administered would be impossible.

The mystery of the fentanyl dosage may be the crux of this case, and it is one of the reasons the case

is in such contention. Sally gave Sandra 5 ccs. in the operating room for the surgery; in the recovery

room a few hours later, Sally administered 2 more ccs. Fentanyl is a potent drug, but fast-acting—

given the time span and the procedures that Sandra underwent that morning, these 7 ccs. are, by

professional standards, a normal regimen. Even if Henson’s theory is true that Sally administered

the extra 5 ccs. which she claims to have discarded, 12 total ccs. in that time period still could have

been an ordinary dosage. While Sandra could have gone into respiratory arrest because the

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fentanyl dosage was too high, the fentanyl could also have reacted with something else in her

system. Or her problems could have had nothing to do with the fentanyl at all. Because there is no

surefire way to know, Henson had to base his case on circumstantial evidence alone.

The fentanyl issue aside, though, Sally’s suspicious behavior in the recovery room that day seemed

to condemn her, so three months after his initial interview with her, Henson arrested Sally and

charged her with first-degree murder.

Looking at the case in retrospect, like a coach reimagining the plays that cost him the

championship, Henson recognized a few sources of error. First is the fact that the investigation was

five years removed from Sandra’s death: not only were documents missing, but witnesses’

memories had faded and warped, leaving Henson to wonder whether they were recalling the truth

or something they’d been told was the truth. “I think because we waited so long it became kind of a

novelty rather than a homicide,” he said: the distance made the death seem fictional, as well as the

characters, like rolling the dice in a game of Clue instead of trying to solve a murder. Then there was

the bond hearing, in which Sally was released on the basis of “the evidence—or lack thereof,” as the

judge had termed it, dubbing the case against her inadequate. So long as Sally was comfortable at

home, she had little incentive to cooperate with the prosecution, but, “had they kept her in there,

she would have pled guilty,” Henson noted. Finally, the charge against her, first-degree murder, had

perhaps been too ambitious. “I think it should’ve been involuntary manslaughter”—or

unintentional killing. “Because,” he said, “in the medical field there are certain standards of care. I

think, had she taken all the precautions and gone to all the measures to help her, Sandra Joyner

would have lived.” Sally had been negligent, he believed, but proving malice and premeditation

would have been a difficult task for the prosecution.

Still, despite the issues that the investigation encountered, Henson speculated that, had the case

gone to trial, justice would have prevailed: the prosecution “would have gotten a jury of twelve

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women from South Park”—a wealthy area of Charlotte—“who could empathize with Sandra Joyner,

and I think they would've won.”

******************************************************************************

Being in the public defenders’ office left me feeling slightly uncomfortable. Thick glass panes

separated me from the receptionist, anti-suicide pamphlets accosted me from the side tables, and

detached historical documentaries prattled from the television. I found myself wondering what had

brought each of my fellow forlorn, waiting-room occupants here—and whether they were

wondering the same thing about me.

One of Sally Hill’s public defenders, Susan Weigand, came out to greet me and take me back to her

office, where we were joined by her partner, Jean Lawson. They were typical professionals with

firm handshakes and dressed in pantsuits, well spoken but with a slight tone of admonishment.

They acted pleased to meet me, though underneath their politeness I could sense their latent

opposition to my curiosity. Their first question to me was, why this case?

I told them of my Googling venture and my interest in the scandalous circumstances of the crime—

But this wasn’t a crime, they told me. There was no crime. I should just quit while I’m ahead and

pick another case.

“No thanks. I like this one.”

The conversation continued in the same vein of defensiveness. They constantly made caustic

remarks about many people involved in the case, only to qualify them with statements about how

they didn’t want to slander anyone. One of the people they seemed to have the most contempt for

was Chuck Henson—or “Hollywood Henson,” as they divulged his nickname was when he was in

Homicide. The All-American with baby blues who had confidently affirmed Sally’s guilt was,

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according to them, nothing but a ham, an attention-seeker with a desire for notoriety who’d loved

the limelight that Sally’s case had brought him. Suddenly I remembered his extended discussion

about how cool it had been to talk to People Magazine.

Weigand and Lawson described how Chuck had investigated the case on his own, not even keeping

his partner in the loop. Instead of consulting a medical expert about the proper administration of

fentanyl, he’d talked to his second (or, they asked themselves, was it his third?) wife, who used to

be a nurse. What they seemed most bitter about, however, was that Chuck had arrested Sally right

before Labor Day weekend, forcing her to remain in jail for three full days before she got an

arraignment—a tactic they claimed Chuck used to wear Sally down. In the end, they believed, the

case had been dismissed because Chuck’s amateur detective work hadn’t proved anything (and,

besides, they said, there was nothing to prove).

They too mentioned Jim Black’s involvement and Tucker’s contributions to his campaign, but they

spoke mostly in ambiguities about how Sally’s case was the result of politics. All of these outside

influences and agendas had aligned, they said—like Black’s known corruption and what they

believed was Tucker’s troubled conscience (versus his bid to restore his lost reputation). From

their standpoint, Sally had been the unfortunate scapegoat.

I mentioned Sally’s demonization in the media, and how the few remarks she made publicly hadn’t

done much to negate their interpretation. All Susan and Jean would say was that Sally was a nice

person; but, they added, as lawyers, their job is not to get to know someone intimately enough to

pass judgment on his or her character. In response to Sally’s comment that “only me, Sandra, and

Jesus know what happened in that room”—a potentially damning statement—they protested that

she was very religious and that Jesus played an important role in her life. As for Sally’s detached

response, upon being released from jail on bond, that she just couldn’t wait to have a cup of coffee,

they claimed that Sally was addicted to coffee; it was practically a medical condition. Sally, they told

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me, was oblivious to how her strange behavior was perceived by the media, which was all the more

proof that she wasn’t some cunning criminal. All she wanted in life was to live peacefully with her

cats.

I ended our discussion with the same question I had posed to Chuck Henson: “Had the case gone to

trial, who would have won?”

They would have, they said. The fact that Sally had turned down plea deals offering her only

probation, instead risking the possibility of conviction and life imprisonment, illustrated her

commitment to innocence. Besides, no jury—even one of wealthy women from South Park—would

ever buy into the prosecution’s shoddy investigation, especially with their lack of any expert

witnesses and no evidence of Sally’s ever having exhibited malicious behavior in the past.

Chuck had convinced me of Sally’s guilt. The public defenders now convinced me of her innocence.

The ending changes depending on who’s telling the story.

******************************************************************************

The line at the County Clerk’s Office stretched out the door and down the hallway. Since I wasn’t

there to see the Assistant District Attorney on call or pay an overdue fine, I got to skip the line and

go straight to a window. A younger guy was working there, playing a game on his iPhone, which he

nonchalantly tossed to the side when I approached. I told him I was doing research and wanted to

see if I could get the criminal case file for North Carolina v. Sally Hill. He clacked away at his

computer, one of those big taupe-colored boxes with black screens that flashed rigid neon green

text. He found the case number I needed, but regrettably informed me that, because the case had

been dismissed, the case file had been destroyed.

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Something told me that wasn’t actually true. So I asked again as persuasively as I could,

complimenting his shiny gold watch and shiny white smile. “Isn’t there anything you can do?” I

asked.

You know what, let me go check in the back, he said.

He returned a few minutes later with the case file in hand. What do you know: it had only been two

years since its dismissal, and they purge documents after five years. It was my lucky day.

He sent me to the record viewing room, where overworked and underslept lawyers were downing

cups of coffee and flipping through piles of case files. I copied the whole file on Sally Hill and looked

through it for any new insights or bold discoveries. The only real piece of interest was Andrew

Murray’s dismissal form. In addition to its conclusion that “the State does not believe that the

evidence would lead a jury to unanimously find . . . that the conduct of the defendant was a

proximate cause of Sandra Joyner’s death,” its list of “significant factors that led to the arrest of the

defendant”—presumably included to justify the CMPD’s decision to arrest Sally in the first place—

mentioned “wrongful and intentional actions . . . [that] could have risen to the level of malice

necessary to support a verdict of second degree murder” (italics mine). So intentional but spur-of-

the-moment second-degree murder maybe could have been proven—but the planned and

premeditated first-degree murder charge that Sally Hill was originally served would seem to have

been unsubstantiated.

An interesting insight, but perhaps not interesting enough to warrant flirting with a smug Candy

Crush aficionado.

******************************************************************************

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Before I could even tell the receptionist of the Hickory Grove Division of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg

Police Department who I was looking for, he burst in to greet me. “Hey there, I heard ya come in.

Come on back.”

“Thanks, Chuck.”

Having risen through the ranks over the years, now Captain of his own division, Henson had earned

himself a nice, roomy office, its walls lined with plaques from his various awards and honors and a

large screen TV that was playing country music videos. We made small talk about the weather and

what kind of pens we like to use before diving into what I’d come there for: his supplement report

on the Sally Hill case. His superiors had decided that I could see the report and take notes, as long as

the report never physically left his office. I’d cleared my schedule for the afternoon and prepared to

comb through those pages.

He handed me the report and made sure I had everything I needed before announcing that he was

on his way out. “If you have a problem, just find the receptionist, okay? Want me to keep the TV on

this channel?”

“Sure.”

The supplement report, an addendum to the initial police report intended to provide further

explanation, contains his notes and observations from the investigation, including summaries of all

of the interviews he conducted. It reads much like a diary, revealing its author’s subtle societal

biases that frame how he perceives the case—as in his constructed narrative of the pretty and

popular versus the ugly and marginalized. Henson makes several references throughout the report

to appearance and status, particularly in regard to Sally and Sandra. “According to Ms. Hill, she had

put on about 120 pounds since high school,” he writes, citing it as the reason why Sandra didn’t

initially recognize Sally and, in so doing, highlighting the women’s physical difference, to Sally’s

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detriment. He notes the class distinction of the two women: “The Joyners and Sandra Baker,”

Sandra’s maiden name, “were from the ‘other side of the tracks’ than her. Meaning their families

had money and her family did not.”

Henson also emphasizes their respective reputations. He found the ex-boyfriend, Jimmy Neal, who’d

allegedly caused Sally to harbor so much resentment toward Sandra. Jimmy told Henson that his

relationship with Sandra was “more of a dating relationship” whereas he and Sally “used to ‘mess

around’” because, Jimmy said, she “had a reputation in high school of being ‘easy.’” In his interviews

with other former high school classmates, Henson repeatedly goes back to Sally’s reputation for

being loose, even recording a rumor that she’d had an abortion when she was a teenager. Exactly

how Sally’s sexual exploits were relevant to the case is unclear, but the focus of Henson’s questions

on these superficial factors sets up a clear contention between the innocent Sandra, whose good

looks and good breeding attracted boyfriends, and the flawed Sally, whose inadequacies and

indiscretions got her only a series of meaningless affairs.

Like the information he gathered about Sally and Sandra’s high school years, much of what he

recorded about the day of Sandra’s death is presented in a “he said—she said” format, Sally

claiming one thing and Tucker completely refuting it. “I asked Ms. Hill why she did not go to the

hospital and she replied, ‘Dr. Tucker told me not to go,’” he writes, and then adds, “According to Dr.

Tucker and the staff, this is not true.” Aside from the basic facts that they were all in the office and

that, somehow, Sandra died, almost no pieces of the competing narratives align.

But even though both sides could have equal interest in deflecting the blame, Chuck clearly sides

with Tucker. Sally is the only person whom he questions with an accusatory tone, trying to find

gaps in her every explanation. “Her basic answer to all the questions,” he notes, “was she had no

idea why it happened.” When she tells him that Dr. Tucker asked her not to chart any of the events

that occurred that day, “I asked her why would he even think about that during all the confusion

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and she could not answer that question.” He uses the facts that “she showed no emotion

whatsoever” during their interview and that “she never denied killing the victim” to illustrate her

guilt, as though sobbing and making loud protestations would have made him think her innocent.

Though Sally could indeed be guilty despite any of Henson’s bias, his apparent assumption about

Sally’s guilt seems to come from little concrete evidence. Most of the people he interviewed from

Sally and Sandra’s past could not remember any sort of feud or tension between the two women,

but he qualifies these memory lapses by stating, “that does not mean it couldn’t have happened.” In

one instance, he receives damning information from Sally’s former co-worker about her general

behavior toward patients—that she was “being rough with patients,” including Sandra Joyner, and

that she would “pull patients’ hair”—but he doesn’t get any more details because he “forgot to ask

her about those incidents.” Another man, who had gone to middle school with Sally and Sandra,

gives a bizarrely specific account of Sally threatening to kill Sandra in the seventh grade, which

Henson had planned to have him testify to in court—even though his account is erratic and full of

oddities such as a “vision” he’d had into the future where “he saw Sally in a doctor’s office and there

was a figure that looked like Jesus standing in the corner.”

Perhaps the most worrisome of these evidentiary lapses is the highly publicized comment that Sally

made about the ex-boyfriend. When it first appears in his supplement report, Henson says that a co-

worker heard Sally state, “This girl dated my boyfriend in high school.” Later, however, when

Henson uses the comment to question Sally and Sandra’s former classmates about their

relationship, he rephrases it to “this girl stole my boyfriend in high school.” While such a small

semantic difference might seem inconsequential, stole connotes more malice and envy—and more

motivation for murder—than the less loaded dated. Whether this change was intentional is difficult

to tell, but it certainly gave credence to the scandalous media reports that continued to characterize

the case.

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When I got to the end of the report, I wasn’t any closer to understanding what had happened to

Sandra or Sally. As I was preparing to leave the police department, I noticed a sign on one of the

doors. Expecting it to be a PSA to buckle up or prevent forest fires, I was surprised by its message:

“One out of four people in this country is mentally unbalanced. Think of your three closest friends.

If they seem okay then it’s you.” Testing this fake statistic, I thought about Chuck Henson, Sally Hill,

Peter Tucker, and me. I couldn’t figure out which one of us it would be.

******************************************************************************

When I attempted to contact Dr. Peter Tucker to get his side of the story, he declined to

speak with me. He just wanted to put the whole thing behind him, he said. So when Chuck sent me

Tucker’s deposition to the North Carolina Medical Board from October 2003, I was glad to get

something from his point of view.

Henson had described Tucker as “flamboyant” and impassioned, a man who called the

police station every day at 12 o’clock during the investigation to anxiously inquire about any

breakthroughs. The media hadn’t provided much of an idea of Tucker’s contribution to the case, but

Henson noted that the detectives had to tell him to “keep your mouth shut” so that he wouldn’t

cause a media frenzy. The public defenders corroborated this depiction of Tucker, remarking upon

his obsessiveness with the case, saying that he had also called the medical examiner every day to

try to get Sandra’s death declared a homicide.

Looking at his deposition, I expected to find that these accounts had been exaggerated, blown out of

proportion to make for better storytelling. Instead, I found a man who had “looked at this thing for

24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 30 months,” and who desperately needed someone to believe his

version of events—though he never seemed to know exactly what that version was.

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His deposition is full of contradictions, and there is no clear distinction between what is fact and

what his memory has twisted or invented. At the beginning of the deposition, he tells Marcus

Jimison of the Medical Board, “let me give you factual information, or what I think is fact,”

associating his own opinions with certitude. Soon after, he admits, “I don’t know anything that

happened,” because he was in his private office when Sandra went into respiratory arrest. Jimison

asks him about several specifics—how much fentanyl Sally administered, what Sandra’s blood

oxygen levels were, how long Sally was left alone with Sandra—but his only response is, “I could

neither confirm nor deny any of those things.” In his own recollection of what happened, he

recognizes that memory is an imperfect function: “you know, when you go to recall something, you

tend to see what you expect.” At one point, he claims that he would “hate to have to go on public

record”—to have comments connected to him that could later prove to be false.

Despite his own uncertainty about the facts of that day, he is quick to discredit Sally Hill’s version of

events. Several times when confronted with what Sally has said, he responds with, “She lied,” at one

point even claiming, “all that Sally told you is a lie.” He admits that he has built his recollection in

direct opposition to Sally’s. “What I've had to do in trying to build my timeline is omit every fact

that Sally gave. Because if you admit all the facts that she gave, it looks like a completely different

picture.”

Tucker vilifies Sally at every opportunity, relating that she was not “the Sally Hill that I had known”

that day, but instead characterizing her hyperbolically as “a rogue nurse on her own wild mustang

riding through the west, shooting whoever she wants.” He alludes to some kind of inexplicable

change in her mental state. “She's flipped out,” he says. “She's going nuts. She snapped.” He

compares Sally to a soldier trying to cope with war. “A lot of times the guy that you think that's got

it completely under control, that's going to be your hero for the day, you'll turn around and he'll be

crying, holding his helmet in a fetal position in the fox hole.” I’m not sure whether this elaborate

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military image comes from personal experience or just his own imagination, but, either way, his

notion is that even the most reliable of people can crumble under pressure.

Not only does Tucker try to label Sally as undeniably culpable, but he also rejects any responsibility

of his own. The goal of the Medical Board hearing was to determine whether Sally or Dr. Tucker had

acted “below the standard of care”—a term that never got more explicitly defined. But, whatever it

may have meant, Tucker is sure he didn’t transgress that line. He accepts his role as the leader of

the practice, saying that he’s “responsible for everything that's done with good intention.” However,

Sally, he says, did not act with good intention, thus he is absolved of any blame. He frames it as “if a

gang guy comes in my office wanting drugs and then somehow in the process comes to the

operating room and shoots my patient, you know . . . I have a little problem trying to accept the

moral responsibility of [sic] her getting shot.” He ridicules the Medical Board hearing when he says,

“I don't know that it's fair to ask if that's below the standard of care for someone to murder

somebody in their office.”

But murder is not at issue in the hearing; it’s negligence—in other words, whether Sally’s

administration of narcotics was reasonable. Jimison asks if there was any protocol for this type of

situation, and Tucker concedes, “Well, no. That’s not written down.” He justifies that admission by

saying, “There's no question what the protocol is. It's not like this is her first time. It's not her first

show.” She should have known the protocol, whatever it may have been. When Jimison points out

that Tucker was supposed to have been supervising Sally, he negates an earlier claim to that effect.

“Actually, we worked in collaboration with each other. I don't tell her how to give anesthesia.”

Tucker’s bottom line seems clear: If something good had happened, he’d have been in charge; when

something terrible happened, he was merely a collaborator, watching from the sidelines.

The deposition gradually reveals elements of Tucker’s personality. He has a penchant for

preachiness, which he acknowledges a few times. “Here I go on one of my little things,” he says, “I’m

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on a soapbox here for one second.” He uses bad humor in an attempt to be affable. “We don't have

an anesthesiologist drinking coffee in the break room,” he declares—then adds, “That's a joke.” At

one point he dodges a question with the self-deprecating comment that “I’m not sure I’m smart

enough to interpret the law.” He often speaks to Jimison as though he were the one on trial, telling

him he’s got his facts wrong or sassing him with questions like, “Now, why do you think she would

do that?” At one point, Jimison jabs back, “Well, I’m not being deposed.” Later on, Jimison’s irritation

with Tucker’s affinity for the dramatic is palpable; when Tucker says that Sally used fentanyl even

though he had prescribed some Percocet that Sandra brought with her, he says, “That's why they

bring them with them. They just don't bring it in there for their own health.” “Well,” Jimison retorts,

“I guess they do bring it in for their own health.”

Tucker’s deposition presents a man with a heavy bias against Sally, but what isn’t clear is his

motivation for bias. Was he trying to restore his own reputation, as Chuck thought? Was it his

troubled conscience, as the public defenders had suggested? Or was it something else? If he really

believed that Sally had committed a malicious criminal act, wouldn’t he have tried to go to the

police sooner? His deposition left me more confused than enlightened.

******************************************************************************

When I tried to get in touch with District Attorney Andrew Murray, who dismissed the case in 2011,

his secretary told me that he was in New Orleans on Coast Guard duty. I wasn’t surprised,

considering the bad luck I’d already had in getting people to speak with me about the case. I

thought I would run into another “missing in action” scenario when I decided to reach out to former

District Attorney Peter Gilchrist, who had been in office for most of the case’s duration. Fortunately,

all I had to do was look him up in the White Pages and dial the number; after a few rings, I was

almost taken aback to hear his jovial Southern accent on the other end of the line.

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The simplicity of contacting him, however, was balanced out by his lack of insight. In his thirty-six

years as District Attorney, Gilchrist dealt with thousands upon thousands of cases—and, though

Sally’s case got significant media attention, it must not have been especially memorable for him. “I

didn’t even recall the case until you refreshed my memory,” he said. Once he started thinking about

it, he could rattle off only a few basic facts: Tucker had brought the case to his attention, Sandra had

possibly died of a drug overdose, the case had been dismissed. He couldn’t recall the reason for the

case’s dismissal, but his tone told me that, since it happened after he left office, it wasn’t really of

concern to him.

“I’m vague on a number of details,” he told me.

“So am I,” I said.

******************************************************************************

Captain Henson’s supplement report had mentioned a pathologist, Dr. Vittal Shenoy, who did his

own private investigation into the case and submitted his report to the lawyers and the police. I set

up an interview with him at his office at Carolina Urology, knowing little about his report or the

motivation behind it. He greeted me with a big smile and tiny brown eyes, dressed in blue scrubs

with his name embroidered on the breast pocket. He was full of energy even when he was sitting

still. He made a popping sound with his tongue between thoughts and addressed himself as “Vittles”

whenever he got jumbled up. He was clearly excited to be talking to me; before I could even get a

question out, he told me that he’d been “looking for someone to write a screenplay with.” Maybe

that person was me? I opened my mouth to politely decline, but he launched into his story and I did

my best to keep up.

Shenoy had been a patient of Tucker’s (he’d “had a wart removed or something”), but they weren’t

really friends—professional acquaintances at most, he said. Thus, he decided to investigate

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Sandra’s death not because of a personal connection, but rather because “pathologists are natural

detectives.” Imagining his job as following clues and solving puzzles, he threw himself into doing

just that with Sandra and Sally. He spent “several months” working on his report, and it “became

like a full time job”—although, as he quickly pointed out, he “didn’t receive a penny for doing this.” I

was astounded by his dedication to a project that he neither had a stake in nor received

compensation for. But he mentioned that he “partially did it to learn how to make graphs and

format text in Microsoft Word,” so it wasn’t totally impractical.

When I had first encountered Shenoy in Henson’s report, I got the impression that he was

vehemently suspicious of Sally and convinced of her malicious behavior. Speaking to him in person,

though, I didn’t sense such conviction. “Sure,” he said, “she killed Sandra. But ‘kill’ doesn’t mean

‘murder.’” She was “negligent and she covered it up,” but to charge her with first degree murder, he

thought, was “crazy.” In order to prove such a charge, the prosecution would have to prove motive,

and, according to Shenoy, “the weakest part of the case was motive.” Had he been on the legal team,

he would have gone a different direction. “Involuntary manslaughter would have been a slam

dunk.”

But his discussion of Sally’s case soon opened up into talk of larger conspiracies; he displayed a

suspicious and cynical attitude toward society, and the healthcare industry in particular. He

explained how things far more horrible happen in hospitals all the time, but they get covered up

and forgotten about because hospitals, like big corporations, have the power to “make them go

away.” This business about the “standard of care” against which Dr. Tucker and Sally were tested,

he said, is nothing but a “legal construct.” The case was “purely politics and money as usual under

the guise of patient safety” because “they” wanted to make an example of Tucker. He never

specified whose politics and money he was referring to or who “they” were, but his charge sounded

like more of a generalization than a direct attack.

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“Basically,” he said, “there is a lot more to this case than the death of a woman.” I had already been

thinking the same thing.

******************************************************************************

In the waiting room during my second trip to the public defenders’ office, the TV was playing a

World War II documentary. As I looked at the images of dead bodies in trenches and concentration

camps, I wondered why they couldn’t show something a bit more cheery. Proof of a cruel and unfair

world seems like the last thing people should have to see before going to discuss their legal fate

with a lawyer.

Weigand and Lawson appeared just as wary of me as they had been the first time we spoke. They

again asked why I didn’t want to look at a different case, a case wherein a crime had actually been

committed. But once we got into a discussion about Sally and the other players, their contentions

and opinions flowed freely.

Much of what they said was repetition of our first conversation, peppered with a new detail here

and there. They talked about the plea deal that Sally refused to take, this time noting that Tucker

and his entourage (who exactly was in his entourage, they never specified) had attended court that

day to hear Sally’s decision—and Tucker didn’t take the news of her refusal well. He cried, they

said, right there in the middle of the courtroom, practically bawled his eyes out. They chuckled at

the memory. I mentioned I’d met with Shenoy, whom last time they’d brought up without much

comment, and they rolled their eyes. Watch out for him, they told me, he’s kind of out there. They

claimed he wrote his report at Tucker’s behest—contrary to what Shenoy himself had said to me—

and that the report reads like a mediocre crime novel.

One intriguing new insight, though, had to do with Jim Black—or, at least, it might have. In

discussing the bond hearing, the outcome of which helped Sally return home to her coffee and her

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cats, they referred to a judge named Nancy Norelli. Norelli was not the judge presiding over the

bond hearing, but, according to Weigand and Lawson, she tried to have the bond hearing shut down

and postponed. It seems she wanted to keep Sally in jail as long as possible.

Nancy Norelli’s maiden name? Black. She’s Jim Black’s sister.

The public defenders did not believe this connection was a coincidence. Jim Black’s fingers were all

over this case, they said, and Norelli’s uninvited involvement in the bond hearing was proof. I had to

admit, it did seem suspicious. But it made me consider something that had been at the back of my

mind this whole time: why would Jim Black want Sally Hill in jail? One of the groups who had

funded him was CRNAs, and in return he had tried to pass legislation to make CRNAs more

autonomous and less dependent on physicians. Sally, who felt comfortable making decisions

without constant supervision, was exactly the kind of nurse Black had advocated for. He may have

owed Peter Tucker a favor, but what real benefit would he have gotten from Sally’s conviction?

The complexities of this question made me consider the fact that, while Jim Black is a dirty

politician who seems to be mysteriously entwined in this case, he may be nothing more than a

scapegoat, someone both sides can blame for their judicial mess—much like Sally Hill may be a

scapegoat both sides can blame for their medical mess. That was certainly the belief the public

defenders held: Sally was an innocent victim, they said.

Besides, had Sally really wanted to kill Sandra, they told me, she could have just done it when she

was anesthetizing Sandra in the operating room—no one would have suspected a thing.

******************************************************************************

When Dr. Shenoy gave me a copy of his report, he warned me “not to make any judgments until

you’ve consulted with me.” I wondered what kind of judgments he feared I might make.

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I expected the report to be a dry, technical read, but it turned out to be more engaging than I had

anticipated. The public defenders were right: the report reads like a bad novel, full of overdramatic

language and odd analogies, with Sally Hill characterized as the evil villain. He writes how she had

been “cloaked under a blanket of deception” with her “devious methods of artifice and outright

fakery,” and he refers to the incident with Sandra as Sally’s “dastardly deed.” He describes Sally’s

alteration of the medicine log as both “her Achilles heel” and “the smoking gun,” mixing metaphors

for emphasis. He utilizes cliché like it’s going out of style, saying at one point that the

“preponderance of evidence shows that Sally Hill cannot have her cake and eat it too.” Perhaps my

favorite of Shenoy’s literary devices, though, is the extended metaphor he uses to narrate the events

of the morning of April 10, 2001. “Sally Hill fired a torpedo at 11:20 a.m. The torpedo struck its

target, a ship, at 11:25 a.m. From 11:25 to 11:35 a.m., the ship started to sink. By 11:38 a.m. it was

inevitable the ship was sinking into the deep. By 11:43 a.m., the point-of-no-return, the ship had

completely sunk.” He then provides a nifty key to indicate what each piece of his analogy is meant

to refer to, with “torpedo = fentanyl injection” and “target ship = Sandra Joyner.”

When I asked him about his colorful diction and use of figurative language, he told me that’s just

how he writes. “I’m only looking for good analogies. Because juries understand analogies. I was

giving everybody fodder for the fight.” He added, “I don’t even know how I came up with all this

stuff. I don’t watch TV crime shows.”

The report is repetitive, restating the same definite conclusions about Sally’s guilt with comments

like, “Sally Hill knowingly killed Sandra Joyner with fentanyl injections.” I mentioned that he seems

more blatantly accusatory of Sally in the report than he did when I’d first spoken to him and he’d

put forth his “killed but not murdered” theory, but he told me that his harsh attitude was mostly for

show. His main argument was that Sally had attempted to cover up her negligence by changing the

medication log. The report also repeatedly displays some of the same documents, such as the

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various timelines of events (constructed from his own investigation and the written accounts of Dr.

Tucker’s employees). He claimed that Sally’s own timeline was different from all of the other

employees’, which made her actions even more suspicious to him. “You can’t believe her timeline,”

he told me. “She’s just going by what she thinks happened.” He acknowledged, however, that every

witness’ testimony faces the same problem of validity. “It’s also possible once you talk amongst

yourselves, you know how things change, there’s false memories”—you start to believe the version

of the story that others have told you. I got the sense he continually presented the same timelines

partly so that he himself could keep track of all of these competing narratives.

But his investigation didn’t include Sally’s narrative at all. Shenoy interviewed Tucker and

much of his staff and had other nurses provide “demonstrations” of recovery room equipment and

procedures; not once did he interview Sally Hill. The information he had about her timeline and her

actions that day came from office documents and witness testimony. He didn’t mention whether

this omission was due to his failure to reach out to her or her refusal to speak with him—but it

seemed odd that, in his quest to be objective and serve both sides of the investigation, he hadn’t

spoken with the one person who had actually been in the room with Sandra that morning.

After reviewing the report, I was again astounded that anyone would put so much time and

effort into a project without receiving any compensation or benefit for it, so I posed the question to

him: why did you do this? “When I see someone die,” he said, “I don’t take it too seriously.” So it

wasn’t for Sandra Joyner’s sake. “I’ve always liked to resolve things that don’t make any sense,” he

told me. “Truly you never believe everything on the surface because there’s always something

underneath.” It’s like playing a game, or reading a Sherlock Holmes novel. “We are not who we are,”

he added.

Well then, I found myself wondering, who are we?

******************************************************************************

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After months of researching, I was in the same position as Dr. Shenoy, with nothing in Sally

Hill’s own words. I looked far and wide for her, using every search engine and “person finder”

website I came across to try to locate her, but without any luck. She is clearly a woman who doesn’t

want to be found—perhaps because, like Tucker, she just wants to put this case behind her. I was

about to give up hope when, in response to my many desperate queries, the North Carolina Board of

Nursing sent me Sally’s civil suit deposition from 2002. Finally, after hearing everyone else’s side of

the story, I would get a chance to see from Sally’s perspective.

Reading through the deposition, however, I couldn’t discern much. Whereas Tucker is

impassioned and snarky in his deposition, Sally is meek and frazzled in hers. She explains that her

most recent bouts of chemotherapy have left her extremely fatigued, so the lawyers take several

breaks to accommodate her. All of the lawyers (Mr. Golding, representing Sally herself; Mr. Holt,

representing Sandra Joyner’s estate; and Mr. Stevenson, representing Dr. Tucker and the Center for

Cosmetic and Plastic Surgery) treat Sally like a child, constantly checking to make sure that she can

keep up with their fast-paced legalese. Each time she makes a statement and the lawyers press her

on it, she gets too anxious to confirm it with certainty, making qualifications like, “I mean, I think

that’s what happened” and “I honestly don’t know for sure.” As compared to Tucker’s brazen self-

assurance, Sally’s confidence is noticeably low; when she says she “hates to sound so stupid,” she

isn’t being facetious.

On the one hand, she presents herself as a woman pure of heart who was simply shaken by

the events of April 10, 2001. She was watching Sandra in place of the recovery room nurse because,

she says, “I’m not the type of person who’s going to say, ‘Well, I’m going to get my job done and not

worry about you.’ I hung around and helped out.” The biscuit image resurfaces, and she explains

that she was heating it up in an off moment because the nurses “don’t usually get to eat or drink

while we’re in the operating room.” She decided to give Sandra a fentanyl injection because “pills

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take 20 to 30 minutes to take effect,” and Sandra seemed to be in a lot of pain. When Sandra started

reacting strangely, her vital signs jumping all over the place, “I really didn’t know what was going

on.” “I had only been in a code-type situation, in 20 years, maybe twice in the operating room,” she

tells Mr. Holt, “and it was nothing like this.” She describes how she went home that night and wrote

down her own account of what happened because, “I was just very upset, and I think this was also a

way for me to try to calm down, you know, because they kept going over it.” The whole incident, she

says, was “kind of a blur.” Sally, who had “been taking care of people for a long time,” was deeply

affected by Sandra’s unresponsiveness. “I’ve seen people turn practically black and blue that never

had the outcome of this.” When she wheeled Sandra into the recovery room that morning, she never

fathomed that things could turn out the way they did.

Sally’s explanation of events, however, includes some inconsistencies. One of the most

crucial questions the lawyers pose to her is why none of Sandra’s vital signs were recorded after

she was admitted to the recovery room; the numbers they have before the ambulance arrives are

based on guesses from other nurses’ memories. She begins by saying that “it’s not my job to take

another set of vital signs,” since she isn’t the recovery room nurse, but later, she claims, “I’ll be

honest, I really don’t know why I didn’t write anything in the chart.” In response to Sandra’s

declining condition, Sally says she administered drugs including Robinol, Ephedrine, and Narcan to

arouse her. Yet, though she saw “different numbers at different times flashing” on the monitors, that

didn’t necessarily mean that Sandra was experiencing any problems. The pulse oximeter isn’t

accurate, she says, “because you’re getting a finger probe and you’re not actually checking their

blood”; it’s just a little clip that can easily fall off. She also added that she believes Sally’s “color

never changed”—which would have been the main way that Sally could have known something was

amiss since she had turned off the alarm for the pulse oximeter. When Dr. Tucker finally came in

and decided to intubate Sandra, Sally disagreed. “I didn’t intubate her because I didn’t feel like she

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needed to be intubated.” When asked why she didn’t go to the hospital with Sandra, she says, “I

remember I wanted to go the hospital but I didn’t.” She can’t explain exactly why.

Even factoring in her inconsistencies, though, Sally seems a kind of pawn in this deposition.

The lawyers ask leading questions—there is an objection almost every other line—and Sally is

forced to make claims that she doesn’t appear ready to make. When she discusses the values of the

vital signs that are included in the reports written after the incident occurred, Mr. Holt asks

skeptically, “And you think you remembered all of these vital sign values we see so far? You just had

those memorized?” “No, sir,” Sally responds. “I can’t actually say I memorized them. At that time,

that is what I remembered.” They ask her about the seemingly meaningless detail of what her

nametag looked like, and, when she can’t remember, she says, “I’m embarrassed to say I can’t tell

you.” They present her with a list of office protocols, which, though she states several times she has

never seen or heard about them before, they ask her if she violated during the Sandra Joyner

incident. When they try to get her to interpret some of those protocols, she stammers for a bit

before asking, “I—I mean, am I just supposed to make assumptions of this?” Not only do the lawyers

treat Sally patronizingly, but they also take condescending digs at one another, even trading Bible

verses to make their points. At one moment, Mr. Holt says, “Just a few brief matters and then we’ll

be finished.” “It doesn’t look like it,” Mr. Golding retorts.

The comment that most struck me, however, and the comment that speaks to this case as a

whole, came in a section where Mr. Holt asks Sally to recall Sandra’s vital signs during the incident.

“I didn’t sit there and look at the monitor the whole time,” Sally says, “because I was focusing on

her.”

Her. Sandra. The victim. The person who was most wronged in the events of April 10, 2001,

the person who deserves the most focus. And yet Sandra is the person who has received the least

attention—from the police, from the lawyers, from the media. Where was Sandra in the frenzy of

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this investigation? When Dr. Shenoy said that “there is a lot more to this case than the death of a

woman,” he was right. But when stripped of the politics and the glamour and the he-said-she-said of

Tucker and Hill, this case is about the death of a woman. It’s about finding out what happened to

Sandra, so that her family—her husband and her two sons—can somehow find peace. I attempted

to contact John Joyner a few times, but he never responded to me, and, after investigating this case

for several months, I can understand why. The case had nothing to do with finding justice for his

wife; instead, its purpose seems to have been only to satisfy the whims of those with power and

control.

I too fell into this trap. As I investigated the characters in the case and got caught up in the

complications of my research, I lost my perspective. “Sandra” often became a name to toss around

in conversation, a prop for purposes of my questioning, rather than an actual person who had

suffered an untimely end and for whom a family and a community had grieved. In writing about

how everyone involved in the case had a different motive, it occurred to me that no one had the

right motive, but I often neglected to recognize what the right motive was—reparation for the loss

of Sandra.

I don’t know whether Sally is guilty of murder or merely of negligence, nor, I think, does

anyone else—except, as Sally notoriously pointed out, she, Sandra, and Jesus. But I do know that

Sandra’s death, at such a young age, in a doctor’s office where she should have felt safe, after a

surgery she got to give her the confidence to take on the world, is a terrible and painful thing that

no one in this case ever mentioned more than in passing.

As Shenoy told me, “a lot of people die.” But each of those people matters. And if we have a justice

system in which they don’t, then we don’t have a justice system at all.

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Notes

The interviews for this essay were conducted in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, during the

fall of 2013, including those with Chuck Henson, Susan Weigand, Jean Lawson, Vittal Shenoy, and

Melissa Manware. I conducted phone interviews with Peter Gilchrist and Dan Kane that same fall.

The print sources quoted in this essay are from the Deposition of Peter Loren Tucker, M.D. to the

North Carolina Medical Board, October 8, 2003, courtesy of Trans/Stat Verbatim and Video

Reporting, Inc.; the Deposition of Sally J. Hill, CRNA for the suit of Joyner v. Tucker, et al., September

3, 2002, courtesy of Westmoreland Reporting, Inc.; the Supplement Report of Detective Chuck

Henson for Case No. 20060823125900, the Investigation of Sally Jordan Hill; and “An Investigative

Report in 2006—The Brain Death of Sandra Joyner on April 10, 2001” by Vittal Shenoy, M.D. In my

research, I referenced the Charlotte Observer, 6 May 2003, 12 September 2006, 24 September 2006,

26 September 2006, 4 October 2006, 9 November 2006, 6 May 2011; People Magazine, 2 October

2006.

Other Sources

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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/did-a-30-year-old-grudge-lead-to-murder/

http://www.wcnc.com/news/local/DA-drops-charges-against-nurse-in-2001-plastic-surgery-

death-121339309.html