OTHER KILLER NURSES

1984

Former paediatric nurse Genene Anne Jones is serving a 99-year sentence for killing a baby girl at Bexar County Medical Centre in San Antonio in the USA. While she was convicted of only one killing, authorities suspect she may have killed more than 50 infants.

Jones, now 67, was found out when another nurse decided to dig into the Texan hospital’s unusually high infant-mortality rate. She discovered Jones’ name on the nurse’s roster whenever a baby had died inexplicably.

But Jones could walk free by 2018 due to a law that grants a mandatory release to inmates with good behaviour. At that point the suspected serial killer will have served only 35 years, just over a third of her sentence.

1989

Nurse aides (left from top) Irene Leidolf, Waltraud Wagner, Stefanija Mayer and Maria Gruber were dubbed the Lainz Angels of Death while working at Lainz hospital in Vienna, Austria.

When they started their killing spree in 1983 they claimed to have done it out of mercy. But later their kills extended to patients they didn’t like.

Although they admitted to killing 48 patients, authorities think they may have claimed more than 300 lives.

1998

A respiratory care therapist at Glendale Adventist Medical Centre in California also claimed he’d killed his patients out of pity.

Self-professed Angel of Death Efren Saldivar, now 47, confessed to killing between 40 and 50 patients and was eventually given six life sentences without parole.

2006

Another German nurse, Stephan Letter (38), was sentenced to life in prison for killing 29 patients in Bavaria.

Letter rendered the patients (most of them older than 75) unconscious with a sedative before killing them with the anaesthetic etomidate and a muscle relaxant.

The serial killer insisted they were mercy killings – even though several of his patients were improving when he killed them. “I did it out of sincere, deeply felt compassion,” he testified. He was charged with – among other things – 16 counts of murder, 12 counts of manslaughter and one count of killing on request.

2007

Irene Becker was sentenced to life behind bars by a Berlin court in 2007 for killing five patients by giving them lethal overdoses of medication at Berlin’s Charité hospital.

Becker, 54 at the time, insisted she’d wanted to ease the suffering of her patients.