By Simon Griffin
We’re all aware of how simple mistakes in hospitals can have
disastrous consequences. But, as horrible as some of the stories can be, most
of them do not involve malicious intent. And we would like to think that the
people we’re entrusting our health to will always have our best interests at
heart. But the frightening reality is that, on some rare occasions, this has
not always been the case.
The Lainz Angels of Death were four nurses working at Lainz
hospital in Vienna.
They were Waltraud Wagner (the “head Angel”), Irene Leidolf, Maria Gruber, and
Stefanija Mayer. They started killing in 1983, and, like so many others,
claimed that they killed patients out of pity. But as all of their patients
were over 75, their killings went unnoticed. As soon as they realized they
could get away with it, they went power mad and began to kill patients that
they didn’t like, or that were difficult cases. They were finally caught in
1991 and admitted to killing 48 patients. Police believe this number is far
higher, possibly over 200. They could have been caught a lot earlier if the
staff at the hospital had been more cooperative in their investigation. Despite the fact that they admitted to killing so many of
their patients, all four women have now been released on good behavior. Wagner
and Leidolf were released in 2008, having served longer sentences as they were
the driving force behind the syndicate. Gruber and Mayer had already been
released. Not only were the women released, which caused outrage in Austria, but
they were also issued new identities so they could start up new lives.
Kristen Gilbert
Kristen Gilbert was a nurse at the Veterans
Affairs Medical
Center in Northampton, Massachusetts
when she killed four of her patients. The first victim was 35-year-old Henry
Huddon, an Air Force veteran, who died of cardiac arrest brought on by an
injection of epinephrine, a drug used to regulate the heartbeat. This would be
Gilbert’s murder weapon for all four of her victims. The second man to die at
her hand was 41-year-old Kenneth Cutting (an army veteran), followed by
66-year-old Stanley Jagodowski, who was also a Korean War vet.
Sixty-six-year-old Edward Skwira, a World War II vet, was her final victim. During an investigation into the deaths, Gilbert was sentenced to serve 15
months in prison for making a bomb threat against the center. Ultimately, she
was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder, one count of
second-degree murder, and a further two counts of attempted murder. Even though
Gilbert had committed her crimes on federal property - meaning she could legally
be executed - she was sentenced to life in prison.
Charles Cullen
Charles Cullen worked in various nursing homes and hospitals
in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Although he was “only” found
guilty of 29 murders, Cullen alleges that he killed 40 people and attempted to
kill far more. During his 16 years as a nurse, he was fired no fewer than five
times, and forced to resign twice. Cullen’s chosen method of murder was the
lethal injection, most often Digoxin, which was subtle enough that it helped
him evade capture for almost two decades. He usually worked the night shift so
that it would be easier for him to drug his victims. He was only caught after
he went overboard and killed 13 patients in less than a year.
As with many of the other entries on this list, Cullen often
chose older victims to avoid detection, although not exclusively - his youngest
was 21-year-old Michael Strenko. Like Letter, Cullen claimed his actions were
mercy killings. He avoided the death penalty by agreeing to help police with
the investigation and was sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences, or 397
years without parole.
Richard Angelo
In the 1980s, Richard Angelo was a nurse at the Good
Samaritan Hospital in New York.
He first attracted suspicion when he gave an injection to a patient who was
later given a urine test. The sample came back positive for drugs that had not
been prescribed to the patient, and which were found in Angelo’s home the next
day. Angelo soon confessed, saying that he drugged patients to induce a
problem, usually respiratory, so that he could step in and save the day. Having
previously worked as a volunteer fireman, Angelo had a thirst for being praised
as a hero. Angelo also said that he had issues with self-confidence and
feelings of inadequacy, and rightly so it would seem. All in all, 25 of the 37
patients Angelo drugged died as a result of his actions. He was sentenced to 61
years in jail for his crimes.
Joseph Dewey Akin
Joseph Dewey Akin worked in the North
Fulton Regional
Hospital in Atlanta
in 1990 before moving to Cooper Green
Hospital, Alabama in
1991. While working in Alabama,
32-year-old paraplegic Robert J. Price died as a result of a Lidocaine overdose
administered by Akin. Lidocaine is a drug used to regulate a patient’s heart
rate, and Akin claimed that he was attempting to resuscitate the man. Akin’s coworkers noticed that the number of emergency
situations increased when he was around, and police believed that he got a
thrill out of the excitement of a dangerous situation. Akin was convicted of
one murder and given a life sentence, but he is strongly suspected to have
played a part in at least 16 other deaths.
Robert Diaz
In 1981, Robert Diaz worked the night shift at three
different LA hospitals. Like Akin, Diaz killed his victims by injecting them
with an overdose of Lidocaine. His victims of choice were elderly patients in
intensive care. The drugs would cause a severe seizure followed by death. In a
pretty careless move, Diaz committed these crimes in all three hospitals where
he worked, making it much easier for authorities to show a correlation between
the suspicious deaths and his work schedule. The investigation into Diaz began after the police received
an anonymous phone call from a woman who identified 19 patients that had died
under his care. All had suffered dizziness and seizures before turning blue.
Following this, a doctor in one hospital reported that several patients’ files
had gone missing. When police searched Diaz’s home, they found stashes of
Lidocaine, as well as a number of other drugs. He is suspected of involvement
in as many as 38 deaths, but was only charged with the murders of 12. Diaz was
sentenced to the death penalty in 1984, but died of natural causes in 2010,
aged 72.
Benjamin Geen
From December 2003 to February 2004, an unusually high
number of patients in the UK’s
Horton General Hospital
were suffering from difficulty breathing. Suspicion fell on nurse Benjamin Geen
after it was noted that not only did all the incidents of respiratory arrest
take place while he was on duty, but that he also seemed to get a thrill out of
the excitement of patients being resuscitated. Geen was eventually found guilty
of killing two patients and causing serious harm to 15 others by administering
an overdose of either muscle relaxants or unprescribed painkillers. When he was
taken in by police, he was found to be in possession of a fatal dose of muscle
relaxant. He was sentenced to 17 life sentences for his crimes.
Stephen Letter
Stephen Letter worked in Sonthofen, Germany
from 2003 to 2004. During that time, he killed at least 28 of his patients.
When first questioned by police, he admitted to killing 12 of them, but he later
said that he couldn’t remember exactly how many he had killed. Most of his
victims were at least in their 70s, and so their deaths were overlooked for a
while. Letter claimed that he killed his patients in order to end their
suffering, but hospital staff and police noted that not all of the patients
were critical. After 42 bodies were exhumed, Letter was found guilty of the
murder of 12 patients, the manslaughter of 15, and one mercy killing. He later
attempted to have all his convictions changed to charges of manslaughter, again
claiming they were mercy killings, but was rejected.
Genene Anne Jones
Genene Anne Jones often used muscle relaxants to silently
kill her victims. But whereas most of the others preyed on the elderly to avoid
drawing attention to themselves, Jones’s victims were exclusively babies. Jones
worked as a pediatric nurse in the Bexar
County Medical
Center in San Antonio. By 1981, the nurses in Bexar County
began to notice that there was an unusually high infant mortality rate. Even more
noteworthy still was that children would die of causes that were completely
unrelated to the reason they were in hospital in the first place. One nurse
recalled a victim who came in after suffering a burn, only to then die of
respiratory failure. So a nurse named Cheryl Pendergraph decided to do a little
digging. She took a list of the children who had died suddenly of unexpected
causes, and compared them to the nurses’ roster. She discovered that all the
deaths had occurred when Jones was at work and that most were her patients. Ultimately, prosecutors were only able to find Jones guilty
of one murder, but she is suspected to have killed 46 children in her spree.
She was sentenced to 99 years for the murder and 60 years for another incident
in which the child survived. Jones has made a number of appeals for her release, all
unsuccessful. However, the Texas Mandatory Supervision act was passed in 1977
and was not amended to exclude violent criminals until 1987. This law allows
any criminal imprisoned between those years to be released from jail after
serving a certain amount of their sentence with good behavior. It has just been
announced that Jones will be released in 2017, by which time she will have
served 33 years of her sentence. A Facebook group has been set up by the
friends and family of her victims. If they can convict her in the killing of
just one other child, she will be in prison for the rest of her life.
Efren Saldivar
In the late ’90s, Saldivar was a night shift respiratory
therapist working in the Glendale
Adventist Medical
Center. He usually
murdered his patients, mostly the elderly, by injecting a muscle relaxant and
was found guilty of killing six and attempting to kill one more. He entered a
guilty plea in exchange for being spared the death penalty, instead receiving
seven consecutive life sentences. While he was only charged with these seven
cases, Saldivar, who nicknamed himself the Angel of Death, once admitted that
he had probably killed up to 200 people, either by drugging them or
deliberately not treating them. Although he later retracted this statement,
police still suspect him of many more crimes than those he was imprisoned for. Saldivar’s coworkers soon came under fire for not reporting
him sooner. Many of them were suspicious of Saldivar, but one of them failed to
report him after finding drugs hidden in his locker, and another even failed to
report that Saldivar once told her he had wrongly injected a woman with drugs.
After his arrest, Saldivar told police that there were other respiratory
therapists conspiring with him, and gave two names that have not been released
Source : http://listverse.com
Posted : September 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment