Bakersfield enters the account as the setting of a private hospital whose run of post-operative deaths forms part of the history investigators reconstruct around Hank Spreen. The city is associated not with a single confirmed crime scene, but with a pattern of medical deaths that drew scrutiny and helped expose a possible connection to Spreen’s later movements.

The Hospital and Its Work

The hospital specialized in cosmetic procedures and relatively minor operations, including cyst removals. Hank Spreen worked there as an orderly. The account places his employment in a broader history of hospital work, but identifies Bakersfield as the setting of this particular cluster of suspicious deaths.

The Post-Operative Deaths

Over a six-month period, three patients who had undergone surgery at the hospital suffered sudden reversals and died in the middle of the night. Their official causes were recorded as heart attacks or idiopathic reactions to anesthesia. Either explanation could occur, but the repetition—three such deaths within six months—was presented as highly unusual. Publicity surrounding the cases helped close the hospital.

Spreen’s Departure and the Investigation

By the time the hospital’s publicity had helped bring about its closure, Spreen had already left Bakersfield. His departure is one link in the larger sequence of movements traced by investigators: the account next places him elsewhere before Michael Burke appeared at CUNY the following summer. Bakersfield therefore contributes a specific, unsettling episode to the investigation’s reconstruction of Spreen’s history, while leaving the deaths’ precise circumstances unresolved in this passage.