Code Blue (The Serial Killer, the Cover-Up, and a Two-Generation Quest for Justice)

In the summer of 1992, patients at a veterans’ hospital in mid-Missouri began dying under suspicious circumstances—but the institution meant to protect them was busy protecting itself. Three decades on, Jake Adelstein comes home to his native Missouri to take up the case his father never stopped investigating.

Strange things were happening at the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital. Patients who should have gone home were never making it out. And in Ward 4 East, the loudspeakers kept crackling with an announcement that told the staff someone was about to die: Code Blue.

When staff raised concerns, administrators found a suspect—a nurse. They acted quickly. But they didn’t call the police. Instead, they went after the people trying to tell the truth. The nurse moved on to new jobs. Death followed.

This is the story of serial killings in a college town, the cover-up, and the devastating ripple effects of a crime that went unpunished. It is a story of grieving families, courtroom battles. law enforcement agencies that fumbled the case, and whistleblowers who should have been heroes but were treated like criminals. At the center of it all: the hospital pathologist who started the investigation and asked his son to finish it.

For the first time in thirty years, Jake Adelstein—the author of Tokyo Vice—has returned to his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. Together with his daughter, Beni, and co-writer, Amy Yoshida-Plambeck, they turn up the heat on a very cold case in a quest for real justice.