NURSE WAS FIRED PRIOR TO MURDER CHARGES
Misused drugs, warrant says
LONDON, ONT.• A former nurse charged with murdering eight seniors suspected to have died of drug overdoses was fired from the nursing home where most of them died just days after the last suspicious death, after being accused of making repeated medication-related errors, The London Free Press has learned.
In a search warrant obtained by The Free Press, the nursing director at Caressant Care nursing home in Woodstock told police early in their investigation that Elizabeth Wettlaufer’s dismissal was “for failing to follow insulin protocol.”
That’s one of several revelations in new information released Thursday in the search warrant that police used to seek Wettlaufer’s education records. The document contains unproven allegations contained in an affidavit sworn by a police officer to obtain a warrant.
Wettlaufer, 49, was frequently suspended from her job at the Woodstock nursing home where she worked and where seven of the eight alleged victims died between August 2007 and March 2014, according to the court document.
Her suspensions were for giving the wrong medications to patients before she was fired on March 31, 2014.
The last death at the Woodstock home, linked to Wettlaufer in the police probe, was that of Maureen Pickering, 79, on March 28, 2014.
The police didn’t begin their investigation into Wettlaufer for another year-anda-half, after she had checked herself in to a Toronto psychiatric facility.
Four other alleged victims named in Wettlaufer’s charges — two of attempted murder through overdoses of insulin, and two of aggravated assault — also lived at the Woodstock facility when she worked there.
The eighth alleged murder victim, who died in August 2014, was a patient in Wettlaufer’s care at Meadow Park nursing home in London and suffered three major drops in blood sugar in the weeks before his death, according to the allegations.
The warrant also alleges Wettlaufer was asked not to return to Telfer Place, a Paris, Ont., nursing home, in March 2016 — where one of the alleged attempted murder victims lived — because of her treatment of staff there. At the time, Wettlaufer worked for Lifeguard Health Services.
Another alleged victim is a female resident of Oxford County and was attended to by Wettlaufer when she worked for Saint Elizabeth Health Services in August 2016, just weeks before Wettlaufer checked herself into the Toronto psychiatric facility.
“It was confirmed that Beth Wettlaufer had direct care of each of the victims mentioned in the Production Orders at, or just prior to, the time of their deaths,” the warrant reads.
Also included in the warrant is Wettlaufer’s letter of dismissal dated March 31, 2014, from the Caressant Care administrator, Brenda Van Quaethem, blaming her for giving the wrong medication to residents.
It wasn’t the first time. The letter indicated Wettlaufer had been warned regularly and suspended four times, including two five-day suspensions.
The OPP wanted the warrant to search Wettlaufer’s education records from Fanshawe College and Conestoga College, because they “may show comments or concerns from professors regarding Beth Wettlaufer’s behaviour or work performance.”
The newly released portions of the warrant detail some of the patient notes at Caressant Care that were reviewed and given to the police by Helen Crombez, then the facility’s director of nursing care.
The warrant says Crombez went through patient notes for a police officer, “specifically the observation of diaphoretic patients, that a patient had a seizure despite not being epileptic, and that a deceased patient had bulging eyes.”
“Crombez stated that these symptoms were consistent with an insulin overdose,” the warrant reads.
Despite these observations, the officer was told insulin wasn’t accounted for or secured at Caressant Care and “insulin would never be looked at as a cause of death.”
Crombez told police Wettlaufer was “dismissed from Caressant Care in 2014 for failing to follow insulin protocols.”
The new unredacted sections also detail the circumstances surrounding other charges against Wettlauifer.
Wettlaufer checked herself in to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto on Sept. 16, 2016.
CROMBEZ STATED THAT THESE SYMPTOMS WERE CONSISTENT WITH AN INSULIN OVERDOSE.
Shortly after, the Woodstock police were contacted by the Toronto police after they had interviewed her.
Her psychiatrist was interviewed by police on Sept. 29, 2016. Wettlaufer’s case is still before the courts, and she has not entered any pleas.
She has been in custody since her arrest last October. Since then, the bodies of Apid Horvath, 75, who died Aug. 31, 2014 at Caressant Care, and Helen Matheson, 95, who died on Oct. 27, 2011 at Caressant Care, have been exhumed and re-interred.
Wettlaufer returns to court by video appearance from Milton, Ont.’s Vanier Centre for Women on Apr. 7.
Family members of some of the victims said they were angry that Wettlaufer was allowed to carry on as a nurse for so long, given the allegations contained in the warrant that she had problems with administering medications and the laundry list of complaints.