There is a large amount of preventable death at the hands of our healthcare systems,
especially in the USA.
Some of it is mistake, or accidental; some of it is gross negligence; and some of it is intentional.
It can be hard to catch, because of the difficulty obtaining the proof needed to show which one it is, but over time is becoming increasingly apparent.
Unfortunately, progress on this issue is largely blocked by widespread ignorance, and denial.
Many people say "No one would do such a thing", and "The hospitals would do everything they can to stop it." Unfortunately, both are extremely false.
To help educate and inform, to help also get perspective and understand, and to help spread the word, here are some notes on Historic Healthcare Serial Killers.
I apologize these notes are messy, they can languish on my harddrive, or here where the may do some good. If I have time I will fix them up a bit.
The fact that licensed healthcare professionals are killing people intentionally while on duty, let alone that some individuals are killing hundreds, or over a thousand patients, each, is not just indicative of concerns over certain health care providers, or any individual healthcare professional, but major, extreme failures in safety in our healthcare systems, which are then obviously widespread, systemic, endemic, and extreme. Examining these cases can start to illuminate some of these failures, sometimes very clearly.
Serial Murder by Healthcare Professionals a.k.a. Medical Serial Killers a.k.a. “Angels of Death”
Unlawful and Inhumane
Some cases that highlight revealing critical dynamics, followed by an alphabetical listing of perpetrators - who have been caught.
This information is mostly in summary, but don't miss these excellent critically acclaimed, beautifully made documentaries on two of the biggest cases in history:
Capturing the Killer Nurse (2022) | Documentary
https://www.bitchute.com/video/6En0JJh4NpHZ
Necrobusiness - The Polish Ambulance Murders
"The exact number of victims remains unknown; hospital officials allegedly misplaced and then destroyed records of Jones' activities, to prevent further litigation after Jones' first conviction.
Genene Anne Jones, licensed vocational nurse, responsible for the deaths of up to 60 infants and children in her care during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1984, Jones was convicted of murder and injury to a child. She had used injections of digoxin, heparin, and later succinylcholine to induce medical crises in her patients, causing numerous deaths.
Charles Cullen
"...how Cullen managed to kill patients right from the beginning of his medical career, and was accused or at least suspected of malpractice on several occasions, yet hospitals let him resign quietly and continue his killing spree elsewhere.
in many ways, the hospitals that employed Cullen also bear responsibility for looking the other way as the unexplained deaths continued.
The recently released book, The Good Nurse, has obviously brought renewed attention and scrutiny to the topic of Charles Cullen and his crimes. The book highlights many of the flaws and inadequacies that existed in the healthcare industry and allowed Cullen to move from one hospital to the next over the course of more than 15 years."
Hospitals Didn't Share Records Of Nurse Suspected in Killings
"Charles Cullen, nurse who allegedly has admitted killing 30 to 40 patients during 14-year career, was able to get jobs at two other ...
Documentary Blames Hospitals for Keeping Killer Nurse Employed
— Charles Cullen was caught several times, but the system was rigged to pass him along, some allege
How did former nurse Charles Cullen get away with murdering dozens, and possibly hundreds, of patients during his 16-year career? The new Netflix documentary "Capturing the Killer Nurse" places the blame squarely on hospital administrators determined to put the interests of their institutions ahead of patient care.
The documentary, which is based on journalist Charles Graeber's book, The Good Nurseopens in a new tab or window, tells the story of how Cullen was able to move from hospital to hospital, even when he'd been suspected of causing patient harm. In some instances, he was fired, but was still given good references so he could get a job with a new employer.
Graeber said in the documentary that Cullen was "caught over and over and over again. ... Those who caught him or had a reason to suspect that something was wrong, passed him on with positive or neutral references, and he always found another job. That's the scandal."
The same may have happened at Somerset Medical Center in New Jersey, but officials at the New Jersey Poison Control Center who learned of four suspicious deaths at the hospital pushed its administrators to make a report, Steven Marcus, MD, director of the center at the time, told MedPage
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/101781
Capturing the Killer Nurse (2022) | Documentary
https://www.bitchute.com/video/6En0JJh4NpHZ
Orville Lynn Majors (April 24, 1961 – September 24, 2017) was a licensed practical nurse and serial killer who was convicted of murdering his patients in Clinton, Indiana. Though he was tried for only seven murders and convicted of six, he was believed to have caused additional deaths between 1993 and 1995, when he was employed by the hospital at which the deaths occurred and for which he was investigated. It was reported that he murdered patients who he claimed were demanding, whiny, or disproportionately adding to his work load.
Majors was one of the most popular nurses at VCH, especially among elderly patients. He received glowing evaluations
...However, suspicion developed when the death rate at VCH jumped significantly after Majors had returned to Indiana. The year before his return to VCH, an average of around 26 patients died annually at the 56-bed hospital and the four-bed intensive care unit. After Majors started working at the facility, however, the rate skyrocketed to more than 100 per year, with nearly one out of every three patients admitted to the hospital dying.
"Joseph Dewey Akin, Nurse 35, who worked at Cooper Green Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, was tried in September 1992 for killing Robert J. Price, 32, a quadriplegic, with a lethal dose of lidocaine.
Investigators suspected Akin in over one hundred deaths in the area over the past decade in twenty different facilities where he worked. However, many of those facilities had thwarted investigations.
Akin had long been suspected of causing many Code Blue medical emergencies, both in Alabama and in hospitals around the metro Atlanta area. The number of such emergencies at one hospital in Georgia was unusually high when Akin was working there, and colleagues noticed that at least four types of heart drugs had been stolen.
In the incident in which Akin was arrested, the amount of lidocaine found in Price's body was twice the lethal dose and four times the therapeutic dose. While defense experts attempted to explain it as something other than murder, prosecution experts had a ready counter-explanation.
At Akin's trial, Marion Albright, Price's assigned nurse, testified that when she came back from a lunch break she saw Akin walking out of Price's room. She attempted to enter it to check on her patient but he had tried to prevent her from doing so."
Ahmad Ahmadi
"Beverley Allitt is an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering four infants, attempting to murder three others, and causing grievous bodily harm to a further six at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire, between February and April 1991. She committed the murders as a State Enrolled Nurse on the hospital's children's ward."
Serial Killer Nurse: The Case of Angel Of Death
30 years before Lucy Letby: The man who brought original 'Angel of Death' killer nurse to justice
Roger Andermatt
Richard Angelo
Irene Becker
Cecile Bombeek
Abraão José Bueno
Burke and Hare murders https://crimereads.com/the-sinister-history-of-medical-serial-killers/
Sonya Caleffi, Italian nurse who is best known for killing potentially a total of 18 people, confessing to a total of six murders, and being convicted of killing five people. She was arrested on the date of December 15th, 2004.She killed her patients by injecting air into their bloodstream, which resulted in embolisms for the victims. She kept a diary with details of her patient's deaths.
Ludivine Chambet
Victorino Chua
Thomas Neill Cream
Charles Cullen, nurse who admitted to killing 29 patients
William George Davis (born February 3, 1984) is an American serial killer and former nurse. He was convicted of capital murder for killing four patients with air injections after they received heart surgery at Christus Trinity Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler, Texas. Prosecutors claimed that Davis had at least 11 victims in total, of whom seven died. Charges were only brought against Davis for four deaths due to the difficulty in proving the others
Jeffrey Lynn Feltner, nurse's aide who smothered seven patients to death from 1988 to 1989 at the hospitals he worked at. After initially confessing but later recanting his statements, he pleaded guilty to two of the murders in exchange for a 25-to-life sentence and no further charges in the other murders.
Kristen Gilbert, registered nurse, convicted for three first-degree murders, one second-degree murder, and two attempted murders of patients admitted for care at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) in Northampton, Massachusetts. She killed her patients by injecting them with epinephrine, causing them to have heart attacks.
In 1989, she joined the staff of the VAMC in Northampton. She distinguished herself early on, and was featured in the magazine VA Practitioner in April 1990.
Although other nurses noticed a high number of deaths on Gilbert's watch, they passed it off and jokingly called her the "Angel of Death." In 1996, three nurses reported their concern about an increase in cardiac arrest deaths and a decrease in the supply of epinephrine; an investigation ensued. Gilbert telephoned in a bomb threat to attempt to derail the investigation.
VA hospital staff members speculate that Gilbert may have been responsible for eighty or more deaths and over three hundred medical emergencies.
Kermit Gosnell
Gwendolyn Graham and Cathy Wood
Lainz Angels of Death
Maria Gruber, Irene Leidolf, Stephanija Meyer, and Waltraud Wagner were four Austrian women who worked as nurse's aides at the Geriatriezentrum am Wienerwald in Lainz, Vienna, and who murdered scores of patients between 1983 and 1989. In total, they confessed to 49 murders over six years but may have been responsible for as many as 200.
Maria Gruber, Irene Leidolf, Stephanija Meyer, and Waltraud Wagner shocked Austria when they confessed to having brutally murdered some 49 elderly patients between 1983 and 1989. Wagner, largely believed to be the ringleader, initially confessed to all but 10 of those killings, though she later recanted and placed her total number closer to 10 (and all of those mercy killings).
But as their trials—Wagner and Leidolf for murder, Mayer for manslaughter, and Gruber for attempted murder—progressed, it became clear that while mercy may have motivated the first few killings, later victims were chosen not for their suffering, but because of offenses as small as soiling the bed or snoring. The murders themselves were carried out either through an overdose of drugs like insulin or through the “water cure,” in which the patient’s nose was pinched closed, the tongue held down and water poured into the lungs. And according to at least one member of the group, the total death count could have been more like 200, though that was never proven
Edson Izidoro Guimarães, "A nursing auxiliary who killed at least five patients in a Rio hospital admitted this week that he earned a commission from funeral agencies for tipping them off about deaths on his shift.
...dubbed Brazil's 'Angel of Death', told police he killed five intensive care patients because he wanted to stop their suffering and earn a little cash on the side. He said he either injected a lethal dose of potassium chloride or removed oxygen masks from his victims.
Although he has admitted to a number of murders, Mr Guimaraes, 42, is being investigated for the murder of a total of 131 people who have died since January in intensive care at Rio's Salgado Filho hospital. During that period the rate of deaths was twice as high as usual on the days he worked.
...Five funeral agencies were alleged to have been allowed free access to the hospital and paid off hospital workers who told them about deaths.
The revelations have shocked Rio. The newspaper Jornal do Brasil condemned the 'absolute laissez-faire attitude' of the authorities."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/may/14/1
Christina Aistrup Hansen
Anders Hansson, 18-year-old nursing assistant, poisoned 27 elderly patients. 24 of them died.
The murders at Malmö Östra Hospital was a Swedish cases of serial murders. Between October 1978 and January 1979
Donald Harvey, hospital orderly claimed to have murdered 87 people, though 37 confirmed victims
Linda Hazzard
Niels Högel, a former nurse in Germany has admitted killing a hundred patients in his care. made the admission on the opening day of his trial in the city of Oldenburg. Convicted of a total of eighty-five murders. Estimates of Högel's alleged victim count have increased since his first conviction; as of 2020, he was believed to have claimed 300 victims in just over five years
Hayato Imai (今井 隼人, Imai Hayato, born 1991) is a Japanese serial killer who murdered three elderly people at a nursing home in Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki between November and December 2014. A former emergency medical technician, he was sentenced to death, and is currently trying to appeal said sentence.
Vickie Dawn Jackson is an American serial killer who killed at least 10 patients at the Nocona General Hospital in Nocona, Texas between 2000 and 2001, using the muscle paralytic drug mivacurium. Despite protesting her innocence, she was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life imprisonment. Vickie Dawn Jackson used a paralyzing drug to murder patients. "It's about the cruelest way to kill somebody,” said a doctor.
Genene Anne Jones, licensed vocational nurse, responsible for the deaths of up to 60 infants and children in her care during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1984, Jones was convicted of murder and injury to a child. She had used injections of digoxin, heparin, and later succinylcholine to induce medical crises in her patients, causing numerous deaths.
Anthony Joyner, assistant nutritionist of Philadelphia's Kearsley Home, of Christ Church Hospital, convicted of raping and killing six elderly woman in a Philadelphia nursing home, but is suspected in 18 total deaths that occurred there. "At his job, Joyner received positive feedback from both the staff and patients. People described him as friendly, talkative, and energetic. He showed a lot of care and affection for the elderly residents he worked with."
Lucy Letby, nurse. When suspected by other nurses and doctors, she denied wrongdoing and cried victim. Hospital believed her and reprimanded concerned doctors. Later convicted of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of seven others during 2015-2016.
'Killer hiding in plain sight' – The Trial of Lucy Letby: The Inside Story | Lucy Letby Documentary
Lucy Letby EXCLUSIVE: The Man Who Took Down 'Evil' and 'Depraved' Baby Murdering Killer Nurse
Doctor who helped catch Lucy Letby calls for full public inquiry | ITV News
Stephan Letter, nurse, convicted of killing 28 patients.
"To his patients, Stephan Letter was a kindly young man who did everything he could to relieve their suffering. Unfailingly friendly, Letter was popular at the Bavarian hospital where he worked as a nurse.
Yesterday, however, the 27-year-old German went on trial in connection with the deaths of 29 patients...
In court in Kempten, Bavaria, yesterday, with relatives of victims looking on, Letter confessed to killing patients with injections. "I would like to acknowledge my guilt and admit that my actions cannot be justified under any circumstances," he said, adding that he was not sure how many he murdered. He insisted his motives were noble. "I did it out of sincere, deeply felt compassion," he said.
According to prosecutors, however, several of Letter's victims were getting better when he killed them. After starting work at the hospital in Sonthofen in the Bavarian Alps in 2003 he killed at least 17 women and 12 men, aged from 40 to 94. He rendered patients unconscious with a sedative before finishing them off with the anaesthetic etomidate and a muscle relaxant, prosecutors said.
Yesterday Letter insisted that he had acted for the best. "I wanted to save the patients suffering and free them from hopelessness," he said. "I knew I was violating laws, but I felt I was right." He now appreciated that his actions were "catastrophically" wrong.
The case has embarrassed hospital authorities, who failed to notice that anything was wrong. Letter allegedly killed his last victim in July 2004. Later that month police turned up to arrest him after some of the hospital's drugs and its fax machine vanished. They were astonished when he sat down and wrote a six-page confession. He initially admitted murdering 10 people. Yesterday, however, the nurse said he couldn't remember the details and may have confessed to more murders than he had actually carried out.
The investigation was hampered by the fact that of the 83 patients who had died at the hospital while Letter was a nurse, many had been cremated. Investigators exhumed 42 bodies. In several cases they established the presence of a deadly nerve drug but in others the bodies were too decayed. "He acted relatively indiscriminately and aimlessly," Wilhelm Seitz, a lawyer representing relatives of 11 of the dead as co-plaintiffs, said. "Not all of the patients were seriously ill, and he had had no contact at all with some of them."
Letter is charged with 16 counts of murder, 12 of manslaughter, and one of mercy killing, as well as two counts of attempted manslaughter. In one case Letter gave an injection to a 22-year-old soldier who was taken to hospital after suffering minor injuries in a fall. She survived but doctors refused to believe her account of events."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/08/germany.lukeharding
Orville Lynn Majors, licensed practical nurse
Christine Malèvre
Steven Massof
Pier Paolo Brega Massone
Reta Phyllis Mays is an American serial killer who murdered at least seven elderly military veterans over a span of eleven months, between July 2017 and June 2018, by injecting them with lethal doses of insulin while she was employed as a nursing assistant at the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Medical Center, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. On May 11, 2021, Mays was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences for the murders, plus 20 years for one count of assault with intent to commit murder.
Frederick Mors
Adrienne Moton
Arnfinn Nesset, nurse, “I’ve killed so many that I’m unable to remember them all.”, the director of a nursing home in Orkdal (now Orkland), a municipality in central Norway.
Soon after he took the job, the number of deaths occurring at the home increased dramatically and unexpectedly. Not much was thought of it initially, as deaths are common in nursing homes due to the geriatric residents.
Someone at the nursing home grew suspicious and alerted a local journalist who discovered that Nesset had been ordering unusually large quantities of a drug called Curacit, a muscle relaxant derived from the same poison some South American tribes use to poison the tips of their arrows and spears.
In 1980, when questioned by police, Nesset claimed to have purchased the drug to poison some stray dogs that had become a nuisance around the nursing home but when pressed, he confessed to killing 27 patients by injecting large doses of Curacit. He was also charged with forgery and embezzlement after evidence that he had stolen from his patients was discovered.
In 1983, Nesset was convicted of murdering 22 patients between the ages of 67 and 94 and was sentenced to 21 years in prison, the maximum allowable sentence in Norway. He was released in 2004 and now lives under an assumed identity. It’s believed that he may have murdered as many as 138 people.
Marianne Nölle, nurse, between 1984 and 1992 killed patients in her care using Truxal. Police think she killed a total of 17 and attempted 18 other murders, but she was only convicted of seven. She has never confessed to her crimes.
Colin Norris
Aino Nykopp-Koski, nurse, was found guilty of killing five patients and the attempted murder of five more
Marcel Petiot
Maxim Petrov
Santosh Pol
Heather Pressdee, nurse, “...pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, and 19 counts of criminal attempt to commit murder.
The guilty pleas regard Pressdee administering lethal and potentially lethal doses of insulin to 22 patients at facilities in Allegheny, Armstrong, Butler, and Westmoreland counties, beginning in 2020. Most of the patients died very soon after the insulin dose, or some time later.”
Raynaldo Riviera Ortiz Jr., “A Dallas anesthesiologist who injected dangerous drugs into patient IV bags, leading to one death and numerous cardiac emergencies, was sentenced today to 190 years in prison, announced U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Leigha Simonton.
Dr. Raynaldo Riviera Ortiz Jr., 60, was charged by criminal complaint in September 2022 and indicted the following month on charges related to tampering with IV bags used at a local surgical center. In April, following an eight-day trial, a jury convicted him of four counts of tampering with consumer products resulting in serious bodily injury, one count of tampering with a consumer product and five counts of intentional adulteration of a drug. He was sentenced today by Chief U.S. District Judge David Godbey, who found that Dr. Ortiz caused the death of his colleague and called his other acts “tantamount to attempted murder.”
Dallas anesthesiologist Raynaldo Ortiz found guilty on all counts
Kimberly Saenz a.k.a. Kimberly Clark Fowler, licensed practical nurse convicted of murdering 5 patients and injuring 5 others. Killed Patients by Injecting Bleach into their veins
Efren Saldivar ...a "The Angel Of Death" where a high number of deaths occurred in the Intensive Care Unit of a California hospital. Hospital staff suspected one of the respiratory therapists was up to something. Rumor’s surfaced of a “magic syringe” used by the therapist, possibly to administer poison to kill patients in the hospital. When drugs were found in the therapist’s possession, investigators brought him in for questioning, at which time he admitted to killing hundreds of people. However, without evidence authorities would have to let him go.
Forensic scientists were brought in to develop a method of detecting the suspected poisons in the bodies of past victims. When poison was detected in several bodies exhumed by authorities, the respiratory therapist called “the angel of death” would finally be convicted.”
The Doctor That Administered Poison To Kill Patients In Hospital | Absolute Documentaries
Felícitas Sánchez Aguillón
Antoinette Scieri
Harold Shipman, British doctor, convicted of murdering 15 patients. Subsequent investigations that compared the mortality rate of Shipman’s patients to those of other practices estimated that at least 215 deaths could be attributed to him.
The "Skin Hunters" (Polish: Łowcy skór) is the media nickname for hospital casualty workers from the Polish city of Łódź responsible for murdering at least five elderly patients and then selling information regarding their deaths to competing funeral homes. While only four people were convicted, almost every casualty worker was involved in selling information and it is claimed[2] that many more were killing patients (either directly or by slowing down the response/not doing due diligence). The price of the bribes paid to the killers was billed to the family of the deceased as an additional funeral charge. The main perpetrators were apprehended in 2002. Their descriptive designation was coined by a newspaper article which first brought the story to the public's attention.
On January 20, 2007, four employees from a hospital casualty department in Łódź were sentenced. The perpetrators were shown to have killed mostly elderly patients using the muscle relaxant pancuronium (brand name Pavulon).[3] The four workers then sold information about the deceased patients to funeral homes, so they could contact the relatives before other funeral homes could. They exacted bribes ranging from 12,000 to over 70,000 złoty.[4]
The killers are:
Paramedic Andrzej Nowocień was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of four patients and for helping Karol Banaś in a further murder. He confessed to more than 50 murders to a cellmate.[5]
Paramedic Karol Banaś was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for the "particularly cruel" (szczególnie okrutne) murder of Ludmiła Ś. and for helping Andrzej Nowocień murder the other patients.
Doctor Janusz Kuliński was sentenced to six years and banned from practising medicine for 10 years, for willfully endangering 10 patients.
Doctor Paweł Wasilewski was sentenced to five years and banned from practising medicine for 10 years for the willful endangering of four patients.
Investigators estimate that about 20,000 people were murdered.
Necrobusiness - The Polish Ambulance Murders
Recently, the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza came upon a remarkable story in the Polish city of Lodz. Dead patients were apparently worth more than living ones. A shady story, one that resulted in the biggest Polish police investigation in history. Investigative journalist Monika Sieradzka travelled with two Swedish documentary filmmakers, Fredrik von Krusenstjerna and Richard Solarz, to Poland's second-biggest city to find out who was involved in the mysterious deaths of ambulance patients. No one wanted to talk. No one, that is, until a man named Jacek Tomalski was arrested for trying to murder his competitor, the apparently squeaky-clean funeral director Witold Skrzydlewski. As a result of these events and for a small fee, a colleague from the funeral world named Wlodec Sumera was willing to explain how bereavement works in Lodz. It turns out that ambulance personnel were bribed to get hold of more dead people. This strategy stopped working when the competition began to offer the same ambulance workers substantial sums of money.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1172023/
by the way that youtube link above is a beautifully made film. outstanding
In the neighbouring Czech Republic it has also emerged that some funeral parlours offer medical staff and police officers around £100 for information about deaths.
Nowocien, for example, boasted to his prison cell mates that he should be given a medal by the national health system in view of the number of old people he had taken off its hands.
The court had earlier heard how allegedly more than 40 paramedics, doctors, nurses, and undertakers had conspired to ship seriously ill elderly patients straight to funeral parlours rather than hospitals, as a way to make quick cash in a grisly scheme that investigators have said could have been going on for almost 20 years.
Undertakers would pay up to GB£300 pounds for notification of a new corpse, nicknamed a “skin”. And when they wanted to speed up the deaths the paramedics would inject them with a drug to kill them.
At the trial, the court heard how ambulance drivers, with the full knowledge and co-operation of some doctors, would inject ill patients with large doses of the muscle relaxant pancuronium to kill them and would wander around outside the emergency department smoking or stop off to buy hamburgers as patients lay dying inside ambulances. During the trial Nowocien, who was later described by the judge as “an agent of darkness”, said: “On one occasion we were to transport a severely ill patient from Lodz to a nearby hospital in Glowno. The driver was going off duty in half an hour so we went to the emergency department and while I waited for the new driver to get ready for his shift I smoked some cigarettes. All this time the woman was lying for half an hour in a locked ambulance. When we finally set off we figured there was little sense in travelling all the way to Glowno because the patient was about to die any minute anyway. So we headed straight for the undertakers instead, knowing the problem would solve itself on the way. We passed on the woman's corpse direct to the funeral home.”
The Health Ministry has not commented directly on the sentence but state officials have suggested low pay for government-employed medical workers could have been the motivation for the macabre scheme. Corruption in the Polish health sector is perceived to be rife and surveys by groups such as the international corruption watchdog Transparency International repeatedly highlight high levels of perceived corruption in local health care. Anecdotal evidence from ordinary Poles has also suggested that many have either given, or been in, a situation where they have felt expected to give a bribe of some sort to a doctor or medical health worker in return for good treatment. Wages for medical staff in Poland can be as low as GB£300 pounds per month—a wage locals say is barely enough to provide for one person, let alone someone with a family.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)60254-2/fulltext
Michael Swango, estimated to have been involved in as many as 60 fatal poisonings of patients and colleagues.
We started doing the background investigation and followed from when he was in medical school to the time he came to us, and that’s when we found he left a trail of suspicious deaths as far back as medical school,” Sackman said. “These cases are extraordinarily hard to prove. The victims many times are very ill, and many times they could have expired from the natural disease process.”
That’s part of the reason why he was only convicted in the involvement of four deaths — he confessed to them in exchange for not being extradited to Africa and to avoid the death penatly in the United States — instead of the dozens he is suspected of, Sackman said.
“I’ve heard and I’ve read and we’ve discussed that it was somewhere in the vicinity of 60 people. Medical serial killers kill so many people that even when they cooperate, they can’t even remember. Can you imagine?” Sackman said.
Louay Omar Mohammed al-Taei
Jane Toppan (born Honora Kelley; March 31, 1854 – August 17, 1938), nicknamed Jolly Jane, was an American serial killer who is believed to have murdered over 100 people in Massachusetts between 1895 and 1901. She confessed to 31 murders. The killings were carried out in Toppan's capacity as a nurse, targeting patients and their family members.
Toronto hospital baby deaths (suspicious deaths never solved)
Joan Vila Dilmé, known as The Caretaker of Olot and The Angel of Death, is a Spanish serial killer and nursing assistant. He is responsible for at least 11 murders committed at the Fundació La Caritat in Olot between August 2009 and October 2010, with all his victims being elderly patients aged 80–96.
In 2014, he was found guilty by the Supreme Court of Spain and sentenced to 127 years and a half imprisonment for his crimes.
Elizabeth Wettlaufer, convicted Canadian serial killer and former registered nurse who confessed to murdering eight senior citizens and attempting to murder six others
Petr Zelenka, nurse convicted of killing seven patients and attempting to kill 10 others
Extra notes:
The prosecution of Charles Cullen, a nurse who killed at least 40 patients over a 16-year period, highlights the need to better understand the phenomenon of serial murder by healthcare professionals. The authors conducted a LexisNexis® search which yielded 90 criminal prosecutions of healthcare providers that met inclusion criteria for serial murder of patients. In addition we reviewed epidemiologic studies, toxicology evidence, and court transcripts, to provide data on healthcare professionals who have been prosecuted between 1970 and 2006. Fifty-four of the 90 have been convicted; 45 for serial murder, four for attempted murder, and five pled guilty to lesser charges. Twenty-four more have been indicted and are either awaiting trial or the outcome has not been published. The other 12 prosecutions had a variety of legal outcomes. Injection was the main method used by healthcare killers followed by suffocation, poisoning, and tampering with equipment. Prosecutions were reported from 20 countries with 40% taking place in the United States. Nursing personnel comprised 86% of the healthcare providers prosecuted; physicians 12%, and 2% were allied health professionals. The number of patient deaths that resulted in a murder conviction is 317 and the number of suspicious patient deaths attributed to the 54 convicted caregivers is 2113. These numbers are disturbing and demand that systemic changes in tracking adverse patient incidents associated with presence of a specific healthcare provider be implemented. Hiring practices must shift away from preventing wrongful discharge or denial of employment lawsuits to protecting patients from employees who kill.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227658570_Serial_Murder_by_Healthcare_Professionals
Orville Lynn Majors (April 24, 1961 – September 24, 2017) was a licensed practical nurse and serial killer who was convicted of murdering his patients in Clinton, Indiana. Though he was tried for only seven murders and convicted of six, he was believed to have caused additional deaths between 1993 and 1995, when he was employed by the hospital at which the deaths occurred and for which he was investigated. It was reported that he murdered patients who he claimed were demanding, whiny, or disproportionately adding to his work load.
Majors was one of the most popular nurses at VCH, especially among elderly patients. He received glowing evaluations
...However, suspicion developed when the death rate at VCH jumped significantly after Majors had returned to Indiana. The year before his return to VCH, an average of around 26 patients died annually at the 56-bed hospital and the four-bed intensive care unit. After Majors started working at the facility, however, the rate skyrocketed to more than 100 per year, with nearly one out of every three patients admitted to the hospital dying.
Also, the circumstances of the deaths attracted skepticism even though most of them were elderly. Some died from an erratic heartbeat after respiratory arrest, the reverse of the normal pattern. Others died from conditions that they had not had when they were admitted or took a sharp downturn although they had otherwise been healthy.[3] Meanwhile, patients began coding at an alarming rate.[7]
Eventually, Majors's coworkers began noticing a correlation between the spike in deaths and when he was on duty and joked about when the next patient would die. However, in 1995, nursing supervisor Dawn Stirek was concerned enough to check the time cards to see who was on duty during the deaths. She discovered that Majors was on duty for 130 of the 147 deaths between 1993 and 1995.[3] Alarmed, she alerted hospital officials, who called in the Indiana State Police. Majors was suspended pending investigation.[7] The Indiana State Nursing Board suspended Majors's license for five years after it had determined he had exceeded his authority by giving emergency drugs and by working in an ICU without a doctor, and VCH fired him.[3][7]
Investigators then determined that when Majors was on duty, there was an average of one death every 23 hours, a pattern that held whether he worked on weekdays or weekends. When he was off duty, the death rate dropped to one every 551 hours (23 days).[8] They also determined that a patient at VCH was 42 times more likely to die when Majors was on duty.[9]
Majors adamantly denied wrongdoing. While running a pet store in his hometown of Linton, he hired a lawyer and made the rounds of talk shows to proclaim his innocence.[3] Prosecutors and the state police were hamstrung at first. They had believed from the beginning that Majors was a killer but could not prove how he killed. However, after Majors began his public relations offensive, several relatives of patients who died at VCH called the state police to report suspicious behavior on Majors's part before their loved ones' deaths. They recalled that their loved ones coded or died within minutes of Majors giving them injections, in some cases before he had left the room.[7]
The state police medical team noticed several patients' heart patterns widening around the time that Majors was on duty. They called in electrophysiologist Eric N. Prystowsky to look at the EKGs. Prystowsky suspected that there were only three explanations for these patterns: a potassium overdose, a sudden heart attack, or a large clot in the lung. With that in mind, in September 1995, state officials began exhuming 15 patients who had been witnessed getting injections and had widening heart patterns around the time that they died. None of the bodies had signs of a heart attack or clotting in the lung, which proved that they had been murdered. After a former roommate recalled seeing potassium chloride and epinephrine vials in their house, police obtained a search warrant and discovered numerous vials that could be traced back to the hospital.[3][7]
Prosecution and trial
After a two-year investigation, Majors was arrested in December 1997 and charged with seven murders. Investigators believed he killed 100 to 130 people. However, prosecutors chose to focus on only seven to avoid overwhelming the jury.[7] A total of 79 witnesses were called to the stand at his trial in 1999. Some of the witnesses testified that he hated elderly people and that he believed that they "should be gassed."