RAGE, NOT MERCY: ‘(I felt) that red surge that she was going to be the one’
A mixture of venom and nonchalance
Elizabeth Wettlaufer, she of no hallucinations or psychosis and with full insight into what she was doing, has no lessons to give.
She is, as duly pronounced by the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health in Toronto, an adult with anti-social and borderline personality disorders and mild alcohol and drug issues.
It is hardly an extraordinary description in the modern world, though Wettlaufer would undoubtedly contest that.
As evidenced by the rapt way she watched herself in her videoed police confession from the prisoner’s box in a Woodstock, Ont., courtroom on Thursday, she believes herself a rare specimen.
From 2007 until August of last year, when she voluntarily walked into the psychiatric hospital and began confessing, Wettlaufer operated as Canada’s most prolific female serial killer, giving insulin overdoses to the elderly, spectacularly vulnerable, frail and often mentally confused charges in her care.
No one noticed anything was awry at the several nursing homes where she worked in southwestern Ontario, most lethally at Woodstock’s Caressant Care.
That’s where Wettlaufer went about the corridors for seven years and found most of her victims.
She was fired from there in March of 2014 — not for killing residents, not for anything other than a pattern of making medication errors.
She was able to continue working as a nurse, finding employment with two different agencies that supplied RNs to various institutions and even to private houses.
People who go into nursing homes are expected to die so little attention is paid when, obligingly, they do.
Caressant Care even had a special “death bed,” into which residents on their last legs who didn’t have private rooms could go.
One of the home’s alleged checks and balances was that if a death was unexpected, and a staffer was suspicious, the charge nurse had a checklist to fill out and tick various boxes that would make the death “a coroner’s case” and result in an investigation.
Alas, Wettlaufer was usually the charge nurse; oops, there goes that safeguard.
As Woodstock Police Det.Const. Nathan Hergott, who interviewed Wettlaufer and took her breezy confession on Oct. 5 last year, told her once, if she hadn’t walked into the psychiatric hospital and blurted out what she’d done, she would have got away with it.
And this is despite the fact that over the years, Wettlaufer made partial confessions to a dozen people — all of whose identities are protected. She told a pastor and his wife that she was taking lives; they prayed over her and urged her to get help.
She told a former sponsor at Narcotics Anonymous that she’d killed eight people; the sponsor believed Wettlaufer was a pathological liar.
She told a former boyfriend that she’d killed two patients.
She told a former roommate that she’d stolen drugs and at times wanted to kill residents.
She told a cousin that she “could be” responsible for deaths, she told a friend from Alcoholics Anonymous; the friend told her to stop or she’d be reported to police.
She told an Narcotics Anonymous acquaintance and by text, an acquaintance from drug counselling (adding, “And yes, I’m guilty”).
She told the College of Nurses she was no longer fit to practise and that she’d deliberately harmed patients in her care; the College is still investigating.
And in 2013, she told a female criminal lawyer, who advised her “it would be in her interest to remain silent,” but to get professional help.
Of all those people, only one reported her, a Facebook friend who called police. ( This was last fall, by which time police already knew.)
And one other, a teenaged student nurse in whom Wettlaufer confided and with whom she worked at the Caressant home, was so shaken she later told Wettlaufer she felt she had to call police.
Wettlaufer told her no one would believe her and she’d deny it.
She wasn’t ready yet to stop.
She killed residents who were crabby. She killed some who were sweet. She killed Second World War veterans who, out of their minds with dementia, grabbed at her breast or were argumentative.
One kiss of death was being designated “a handful.”
But then she killed Helen Matheson, who was at 95 one of the quiet ones. Matheson told her one night she loved blueberry pie and ice cream. Wettlaufer went out on her break and got her a small pie and ice cream. Matheson took three or four bites, she told the detective, and then told her, “That’s enough, dear, but the crust is lovely.”
Then, Wettlaufer said, the last supper being over, “That night I overdosed her. She was the one to go.”
She claimed variously to have felt “the red surging,” and sometimes attributed it to God telling her what to do, and to flashes of anger and impatience with her job, life or relationship. After she gave an overdose, she was often overcome with “the laughter,” cackling laughter. She admitted that if a resident was difficult or a handful, that might have played a role in his or her selection as a target.
Her confession, two and a half hours long, was galling for her nonchalance and blithe good cheer throughout.
Once, when an officer came in with cans of soda for her and the detective constable, she chirped, “Which one has the vodka in it?”
Another time, an officer opened the door, apparently by mistake, and Wettlaufer trilled, “Where’s my burger!”
Once, her cell rang — a jaunty little tune — and she picked it up, mid- interview, and said, “Call you back in 30 minutes.”
She complained endlessly about how hard it was to be a nurse, and her own drive to perfection. “I had to be the best possible person,” she said once, without a trace of irony.
She excused herself several times to pee, and warned the officer she “might have to fart.” She giggled.
She was barely interesting, just another serial killer who even “journalled” for a time on her killings.
But as those dignified families tumbled out of the courthouse into the sun, they were stunned, and not by Wettlaufer so much, but that so many of their parents had been murdered, or almost murdered, or assaulted, and that no one noticed.
The lesson is, don’t get old.
WETTLAUFER MADE PARTIAL CONFESSIONS TO A DOZEN PEOPLE