Ascary and surprising number of serial killers work in hospitals. The reason is twofold: some serial murderers gravitate toward hospitals because of their ready supply of potential victims, but even more than this, dramatic methods like shooting or strangling don’t have to be used in hospitals. Indeed, medical serial killers can kill patients, usually fragile and weak, in a variety of ways, including poisoning, suffocating, disconnecting machines, inducing overdoses of medication, or even drowning. Medical serial killers have been doctors, nurses, and aides; they have been male and female, black and white. Such killers are more common than anyone would like to think.
Purported motives vary, at least on the surface. For example, some medical serial killers try to play hero, administering a drug to induce a crisis such as cardiac arrest and then saving the person. However, sometimes the patient dies. Others kill under the guise of mercy, or for profit, and some are likely just plain sadistic. Many of them never get caught, but occasionally one does when the sheer number of dead patients triggers an investigation or when there’s a small glitch or abnormality that drives people to start looking beneath the surface. So it was with Arnfinn Nesset, a mild-looking, balding, bespectacled man in his forties who was the most prolific medical serial killer in Norway’s history.
As it happened, in early 1981 someone noticed that Nesset, hospital manager of the Orkdale Valley Nursing Home, had ordered a large amount of Curacit, a derivative of curare, a lethal poison that South American Indians put on the tips of their arrows. If administered in a large dose to a person, Curacit interferes with respiration and causes death by suffocation. However, it breaks down in a person’s system and is very difficult to detect as a cause of death. Orkdale Valley had had a very high death rate among its residents since it had opened in 1977. Maybe the poison and the death rate were related?
The police were contacted and they interviewed Nesset, who claimed he bought the poison to put down a dog—a dog that, given the amount of Curacit, would have to have been the size of an elephant. On March 9, 1981, forty-six-year-old Nesset was arrested for murder: He was eventually charged with the murder of twenty-five people, eleven women and fourteen men. The victim’s ages ranged from sixty-seven to ninety-four, and all had died between 1977 and 1980—the exact time frame that Nesset had worked there. Nesset denied culpability at first, but then admitted that he had indeed ended the lives of the patients. At one point he said, “I’ve killed so many I’m unable to remember them all.”
After Nesset’s confession to the Orkdale Valley murders, police probed deaths at three other facilities where he had worked since 1962 and eventually determined that he had likely killed at least sixty-two patients. But proving it—because of the way the body breaks down the poison—was difficult, if not impossible, so police did not pursue indictments on many of the deaths.
Before his trial started in October 1982, Nesset had a surprise for prosecutors: He withdrew his confessions and pleaded innocent, using a basic defense of euthanasia. He claimed he killed the people to put them out of their misery. Prosecutors battled this by saying that the murders had nothing to do with mercy killing—a position that was easily proved, as Nesset had embezzled some $1,800 from the people he killed. The defense countered that Nesset had donated all the money to charity, but it wasn’t enough. On March 11, 1983, he was found guilty of twenty-two murders and assorted embezzlement charges. Shockingly—at least for Americans—he was sentenced to only twenty-one years in jail, the maximum allowed under Norwegian law, but there is also the possibility of being sentenced for an additional ten years of preventive detention.
Who Am I?
Answer: I am Dr. Harold Shipman.
