Mario Jascalevich

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.

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.

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.

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.

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