The family of Laura Lee Slayton filed a lawsuit in Garland County Circuit Court in Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1980 charging that when Laura Lee died in 1978 in Ouachita Memorial hospital it was caused by an act of negligence on the part of a nurse.
The lawsuit was ongoing in 1981 when Susan Deer was admitted to the hospital with injuries to her throat. Susan was lucid, and spoke with doctors as they prepared for surgery, but that same nurse, when asked to move Susan’s nose tube to her throat, removed the tube from Susan’s nose, but couldn’t insert it into her throat. Rather than ask for help she continued to try. When the doctors finally discovered what she was doing, they quickly took over, inserted the breathing tube, but by that time it was too late. Susan was pronounced dead a few hours later.
The same nurse, two deaths, it would seem to be an open and shut case. But that nurse happened to be Virginia Dwire Kelley, the mother of Bill Clinton, who in 1980 was governor of the state of Arkansas, and while not governor in 1981, still had a lot of political clout.
The medical examiner in the Susan Deer case was Dr. Fahmy Malak, who concluded that Susan Deer died only from her injuries, and omitted any mention of the lack of proper medical care, thus securing Bill Clinton’s political patronage.
The Slayton family’s lawsuit was quietly settled. Another man was charged and imprisoned for Susan Deer’s death. Virginia Kelley’s hospital privileges were revoked and everything seemed to have quieted down, until Dr. Malak started calling in that political patronage he’d bought with his cleverly crafted autopsy.
In 1985 Malak ruled that the shooting death of Raymond Albright was a suicide. But Albright died of 5 bullet wounds to the chest with a Colt 45, an extremely powerful handgun. Albright’s family smelled a cover-up, but couldn’t prove anything.
In 1987 Malak ruled the deaths of two teenagers to be the result of drug abuse. A second autopsy, however, showed that one boy had been stabbed in the back and the other struck in the skull. A grand jury overruled Malak and ruled the deaths as homicides.
Case after case emerged showing Malak was either incompetent or on the take. By the early 1990’s, again as governor, President Clinton knew that Malak was a liability, but also knew that Malak was the key to keeping Clinton’s mother out of prison.
Having established that he took care of those who did him favors, his Director of the Department of Health, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, hired Malak as a consultant on sexually transmitted disease. A position he was wholly unqualified, having never actually treated a live patient in his entire career.
We all know how Joycelyn Elders was paid back. A token appointment as Surgeon General under President Bill Clinton.
