The Bad Nurse Read Online Free PDF Page A

Facebook activity, however, it became easy to see how that unconditional support had occurred.
    Karri was a competent writer, and a master manipulator, who spent a great deal of time online, both before Shaw’s death, during the time prior to her arrest, and then later, by having friends post writings she had mailed to them from her jail cell. She knew exactly how to portray herself as a devoted mother, wife, and friend, and how to make other young mothers identify with her by telling them what they most wanted to hear. She wrote about birthdays, church dinners, youth group activities, her marriage and home life, and her children’s daily escapades. Her request for prayers was a constant and ongoing plea.
    Karri had also written a great deal about her work as a nurse, but after she left her job at the Chattanooga Surgery Center in 2009, she began to write about her ensuing job search and at one point she believed that she was going to be hired at Baptist Medical Center DeKalb in Fort Payne, Alabama.
    In mid-July 2009, after writing several times about how excited she was to be starting her new job, Karri wrote that she had just received a call from human resources at the hospital saying that she would not, after all, be going to work there because the economy had forced their CEO to put a freeze on hiring. Karri wrote that she had already been through her background check, drug test, and other employment preliminaries, and said she was utterly crushed to get the news only three days prior to the time she was due to be starting work.
    After her arrest, there was some speculation that the hospital had somehow gotten wind during her background check that she had, for some time, been a person of interest in Shaw’s murder. That fact could have accounted for the sudden and unexpected last-minute hiring freeze.
    Karri blogged that she had decided her bad luck was the Devil’s work, trying to kick her while she was down. She stated that she was immediately going to put in applications “all over Northeast Alabama and Chattanooga.” If none of those panned out, she would try Lowe’s and Walmart. The hospital job, she said, was evidently “not part of God’s plan” for her at the time and she believed that the situation would ultimately give her even more opportunities to prove her “love and devotion to Him.”
    This particular post ended with a highly ironic sentence pointing out that Karri had almost forgotten that it was her thirty-second birthday that day:
    [P]roud to say it, because the alternative to not having a birthday is well . . . you know . . . not so good!
    An odd statement for her to make, as she had most likely put an end to any further birthdays her stepfather might have had.

CHAPTER 13
    A fter blogging continually for such a long time, Karri’s posts had abruptly ended on March 18, 2010, two months prior to her arrest for murder. She was obviously well aware by that time that the grand jury was about to convene and that she would very likely be indicted for capital murder.
    Her last post consisted of two sentences, the announcement that her blog had moved. But on going to the new address, there was nothing to be found except a blank page.
    Instead of a personal blog, the Facebook site called “Truth for Karri” had quickly sprung up and had become the hub of information for all her supporters. Updates on the case against her were constantly posted, along with indignant denials of her guilt. Karri’s letters to her faithful followers, her poems, and her claims of innocence were sent to her husband and friends, who then placed them online for all her other friends and acquaintances to read, share, and comment on—and comment they did. They also used every opportunity to post comments on Internet and newspaper message boards and write letters to the editor every time a news item concerning the case was published. It was a masterfully planned and