The ‘shadow of death’ nurse who killed her patients in secret
‘She was far from an angel of mercy,’ said Superior Court Justice Bruce Thomas when he sentenced Elizabeth Wettlaufer to a life behind bars. ‘Instead, she was a shadow of death that passed over [her victims].’
Elizabeth Wettlaufer remains one of the worst serial killers in Canadian history. Armed with an insulin pen, the nurse secretly targeted frail hospital patients between 2007 and 2016 and left them for dead.
Wettlaufer hinted to friends about being responsible for the deaths but they never believed her, thinking she couldn’t be capable of causing such terror.
It was only when the killer confessed to authorities herself that her double life, as a deranged murderer, came to light.
Who was Elizabeth Wettlaufer?
Wettlaufer was born into a ‘very controlling ‘ religious family on June 10, 1967 in Zorra Township, a rural community near Woodstock in Ontario. She studied religious education counseling at London Baptist Bible College before she went on to earn a nursing degree at Conestoga College.In 1997, she married truck driver Donnie Wettlaufer after the pair met at a Baptist church.
On paper, Wettlaufer was a ‘caring’ individual when she was first hired at Caressant Care in 2007, a long-term care home in Woodstock.
But the mental health of the nurse – who was earning $60,000 (£45,000) a year – soon spiralled as she struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse. Wettlaufer routinely turned up for work drunk, or missed shifts entirely. She struck up a relationship with a woman she’d met online and when her husband Donnie found out about the affair, he left her.
In 2014, Wettlaufer was fired after she gave the wrong medication to a patient. Little did anyone know at that point, just how dangerous she truly was.
After leaving her care home job, Wettlaufer had stints in rehab and several temp jobs; one of which she was fired from after stealing medication. During this time, Wettlaufer started to write strange poetry.
The confession
In September 2016, Wettlaufer gave her Jack Russell dog, Nashville, to a friend and entered an inpatient drug rehabilitation program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto.
Here, she confessed to staff that she had killed or attempted to kill several of her patients. She hand wrote a list with several names and dates. Soon, a horrific story started to unravel.
Police discovered that several deaths of patients at Carressant Care, thought to have been natural, were actually caused by the nurse meant to protect them.
Wettlaufer had snuck into the facility’s medicine stores and inserted insulin into what’s known as an ‘insulin pen,’ typically used to treat people with diabetes. But the killer nurse would load up the pen with huge doses and jam it into the bodies of elderly patients which caused hypoglycemic shock — a blood-sugar level crash.
Who were Elizabeth Wettlaufer’s victims?
84-year-old James Silcox was a World War II veteran and father of six who died in 2007 at the hands of Wettlaufer. She then murdered Maurice Granat, 84, Gladys Millard, 87, Helen Matheson, 95, Mary Zurawinski, 96, Helen Young, 90, Maureen Pickering, 79. Her killing spree – and non-fatal attacks on other patients – lasted until 2016.
In some instances, death was quick after vital organs shut down and blood circulation faltered. In others, the killer’s victims fell into comas for several days before dying.
Not only had Wettlaufer killed with ease [insulin stocks weren’t monitored at Carressant Care] and she also stole drugs from the facility. She’d pocket an opioid called hydromorphone from cupboards or patients’ bedsides when other staff weren’t looking. ‘I was always just feeling like I had to be the best person,’ she later told police, adding that taking the drug at work meant ‘that pressure was gone.’
Wettlaufer said she ‘knew the difference between right and wrong,’ but that ‘surges’ had taken over and left her laughing and ‘cackling from the pit of hell.’
She added: ‘God or the devil or whatever, wanted me to do it.’
Wettlaufer also claimed to have told a former partner and friends about the killings – but no-one believed her. A lawyer advised the nurse to take her evil secrets to the grave, she claimed during her time in rehab. She also visited her local pastor – who has never been named by the courts nor the police – and his wife, who didn’t take action when Wettlaufer claimed to have committed murder.
‘They [the pastor and his wife] prayed over me,’ the serial killer later recalled. ‘And they said to me how this was God’s grace. “But if you ever do this again, we will have to turn you in to the police.”’
Why did Elizabeth Wettlaufer kill?
Wettlaufer never claimed to gain pleasure from the murders she carried out, stating that she felt horrible after killing each victim. Court documents state she had ‘significant symptoms of borderline personality disorder’ which could have spurred her need to kill.
The former nurse waived her right to a preliminary hearing and confessed to murdering eight senior citizens and attempting to murder six others in southwestern Ontario between 2007 and 2016. She was sentenced to eight concurrent life terms in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years.
‘I have caused horrendous pain,’ Wettlaufer would say during sentencing. ‘Sorry is much too small a word. I hope that the families can find some peace and healing.’
During investigations, it had also emerged that, while working at Caressant Care, Wettlaufer had injected sisters Clotilde Adriano, 87, and Albina Demedeiros, 88, with insulin they did not need. While the amount administered wasn’t fatal, Wettlaufer was charged and confessed to two counts of aggravated assault.
When the killer spoke to police about the attack on Clotilde, she told them: ‘I just don’t know. I was angry and, um, had this sense inside me that she might be a person God wanted back with him. I honestly felt that God wanted to use me.’
What happened next
Wettlaufer was held at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario after her 2017 trial. In March 2018, she was moved to an ‘unspecified secure facility’ in Montreal to receive medical treatment.
‘I don’t really want to hear from her,’ Laura Jackson, a friend of Maurice Granat, one of Wettlaufer’s victims, would later tell the press. ‘She did what she did. How do you apologise for that? The whole thing just makes me sick and angry. I don’t ever want [Wettlaufer] to breathe free air again. I want her to live in a box and contemplate what she’s done and know that because of her actions she’s put herself into a box.’
Following an inquiry, nursing homes in Ontario were ordered to increase funding, introduce strict monitoring of medicine stocks and boost staffing levels to prevent a similar set of tragedies as caused by Wettlaufer. A four-volume report, released in 2019, spelled out 91 recommendations in the wake of the killings.
‘We cannot assume that because Wettlaufer is behind bars, the threat to the safety and security of those receiving care in the long-term care system has passed,’ said Justice Eileen Gillese who wrote the report.
‘People are now worried about whether the long-term care system can safely provide care for their loved ones and for themselves as they age,’ she added. ‘The offences were a result of systemic vulnerabilities in the long-term care system and not the failures of any individual or organisation within it. Systemic issues demand systemic responses.’
Ms Gillese also suggested that nurses in the region be educated on the possibility of serial killers within the health industry – so they knew to be aware of the signs.
Wettlaufer isn’t the first medical professional to go on a killing spree. Nursing assistant Reta Mays carried out a ‘motiveless’ killing rampage at the Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centre in Clarksburg, West Virginia between 2017 and 2018. Meanwhile baby killer Lucy Letby recently lost her bid to appeal murder convictions stemming from her time at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Cheshire between June 2015 and June 2016.
However, the confusion over Wettlaufer’s motive – or lack thereof – still baffles experts.
Ingrid Grant, a criminal lawyer, told CBC News: ‘It certainly is an odd case. We don’t see very many cases of women committing murder, certainly not in cases like this. She describes feeling a red surge before she killed, she got some kind of thrill out of it. It’s a really rare circumstance to have for anyone, but particularly a woman.’
She added: ‘There’s a strange irony because there are some people who say, “They’ll only get out when they’re very old and have to be put in nursing care,” – but that’s the last place where Ms. Wettlaufer should go because that’s where she committed her crimes.’
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Kirsten.Robertson@metro.co.uk
Share your views in the comments below.