Angels of Death. Emily Webb
and could also get highly agitated and aggressive. So much so a privately paid care attendant was employed to assist at times to relieve the nursing staff at Carresant. The evening Mrs Pickering was dosed with insulin, Wettlaufer was the charge nurse and busy attending to the whole facility.
Mrs Pickering was transferred to the local hospital after she was found unresponsive and sweating heavily. The hospital determined she’d had a stroke and returned her to the care facility’s palliative ward where she died, in much discomfort. The nursing notes described that she responded to touch and voice with moans and eye movements and then deteriorated further over the next few days and passed away.
Wettlaufer had been moved on from Carresant Care when Mrs Pickering died after she’d made an error with administering drugs to a patient. For Carresant Care it was the last straw in a catalogue of concerns held about Wettlaufer. It was revealed later at the public enquiry, sparked by Wettlaufer’s crimes that when the Carresant Care administrator was filling out the termination form to submit to the College of Nurses of Ontario, she ran out of room because there had been so many incidents of misconduct recorded on Wettlaufer’s file.
Wettlaufer found another job at a care home – Meadow Park Nursing Home and in April 2014 she continued her killing spree, fatally injecting Arpad Horvath, 75. Mr Horvath had multiple health issues including dementia and diabetes and according to Wettlaufer’s confession, he tried to fight off the nurse as she administered the fatal dose of insulin. Mr Horvath lingered for a week, dying on 31 August 2014.
The killer RN moved on again, this time so she could get clean and sober. Wettlaufer was relying heavily on alcohol and opioids (stolen from her workplaces) to manage the stress she felt about her personal life and work. In fact in her confession she blamed her offending, in part, on stress and the demands of her role as an RN in aged care.
She found work with an agency that provided home-based care and another retirement and aged care home called Telfer Place in Paris, Ontario.
There, in September 2015 she attempted to murder a woman in her 70s called Sandra Towler who was hospitalised after being injected with insulin by Wettlaufer but survived.
The next victim was a woman called Beverly Bertram who was 69 and required care in her home after having surgery on her leg. A diabetic, Ms Bertram needed a nurse to administer intravenous antibiotics via a picc line. Wettlaufer attended to her on August 20 2016 for Saint Elizabeth Health Care.
After visiting Ms Bertram, Wettlaufer turned up unannounced at another patient’s home. This person was in the shower while Wettlaufer let herself in, claiming she was looking for an oxygen meter she’d left there on a previous visit. She was actually rifling through the person’s medication to steal insulin to use on Ms Bertram. Her motive was calculating; Ms Bertram was a diabetic with her own insulin but Wettlaufer knew that if Ms Bertram died, her medication would be checked. Nothing would seem amiss if her insulin supply was in order and therefore, no one would scrutinise Wettlaufer’s actions.
Wettlaufer put insulin through Ms Bertram’s picc line and the woman reported later feeling very unwell. In a move that saved her life, Ms Bertram did not give herself her dose of insulin that day and recovered at home. Wettlaufer checked Ms Bertram’s medical notes to see that the woman had survived.
Days later she resigned from Saint Elizabeth Health Care. It was a move that displayed some sort of restraint and acknowledgment of the danger she posed to her patients. The agency had told Wettlaufer she’d be assigned to caring for children with diabetes in a school environment. Wettlaufer panicked. She later told police she could not trust herself not to do harm to her young patients.
It was actually a tip-off to police that set them on the path to Wettlaufer. While she was a patient at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) Wettlaufer had confided information that led staff to report concerns to police about the possible killings of patients in her care. The Centre invited Wettlaufer to talk to a lawyer but when she declined the offer they told her they had to report the information to the police and the College of Nurses of Ontario. This did not halt Wettlaufer’s confessions and she continued to disclose information, like a purge, during her stay at CAMH.
A handwritten confession (in addition to the long interview with police in which she confessed all and tried to explain her actions) detailed the patients that died, and didn’t die, at her hand.
Wettlaufer matter-of-factly wrote who her victims were, why she targeted them and how she felt at the time of committing the murders. For one of the victims, Helen Matheson, Wettlaufer describes her as “quiet and reserved” and “I’m not sure why I chose her. I was feeling angry an (sic) frustrated about my job…”
There was also additional confession from Wettlaufer to murdering another patient, which would have pushed her victim count up to 15 (nine murders and six attempted murders).
This was publicly revealed by CBC News on 31 January 2019. The national broadcaster found out the information from a partly redacted London (Ontario) Police Report revealing Wettlaufer had confessed to injecting palliative care patient Florence Beedall, 77, with insulin in August 2014 while she worked at Meadow Park care home.
Ms Beedall died an hour after being injected with insulin. Despite police conceding they had grounds to go ahead with a charge of assault with a weapon, the charge didn’t proceed. A factor was the concerns of Ms Beedall’s family about unwanted publicity.
The confessions saved much time and expense for police and the Crown Prosecutors who would have faced an almost impossible task of proving the murders had Wettlaufer not spilled all her secrets in the two-and-a-half hour confession. Most of her victims were cremated but two bodies were exhumed.
That Wettlaufer confessed and has spoken at length to investigators is invaluable to the study of killers, especially those who are in the business of studying the motivations and red flags for healthcare serial killers. Wettlaufer said she confessed to the killings out of fear she would harm children after she was told she would be transferred to work in schools where she’d be helping students, in particular with diabetes (her murder method was death by insulin).
In the small interview room in Woodstock, Ontario, Wettlaufer sits barefoot, in a red top and black trousers calmly confessing to her crimes.
‘I did have a sense when my marriage broke up God was going to use me for something…,’ Wettlaufer told the detective. (In 1997 she married Daniel Wettlaufer, a truck driver she’d met at church and the pair separated in 2007.)
‘After a while…some of the murders…whether it was God or the Devil pulling me…’
Susan Horvath, whose father Arpad Horvath was murdered by Wettlaufer told a media pack after the nurse pleaded guilty that she was traumatised by how her father had died and would never forgive the killer nurse.
‘She created all this to get caught…she planned this step by step…she wanted to get caught…’ Ms Horvath said.
‘I mean if anyone wants to destroy their life, this is how you do it…she just pulled the plug on herself…’
Ms Horvath called on changes to happen to nursing homes – better policy, more due diligence on the hiring of staff and improvements in the administration of aged care.
‘I don’t want my dad’s death and everybody’s death to be wasted…we have to make a change.
‘I know one thing, my mom is not stepping into a nursing home.’
Wettlaufer received the automatic sentence for first degree murder under Canadian law – 25 years before eligibility to apply for parole.
The ripple effect of Wettlaufer’s crimes not only affected family and friends of her victims but also the overall psyche of people (and their loved ones) who would spend the last months or years of their lives in aged care.
At the inquiry Dian Shannon, the then head of Telfer Place, Wettlaufer’s last place of employment said; ‘Pretty much everyone wants to die before you move into long-term care, given the option’.
‘We were trying really hard